cover story
newsmaker of 2021
SLASH AND BURN Former president Jacob Zuma showed this year that he will do anything to keep out of prison and keep a hold on power — even if that means SA has to go up in flames. The awful irony is that the looting of the fiscus during his presidency played no small role in creating the poverty so cynically exploited by his allies during the July unrest
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Natasha Marrian marriann@fm.co.za
o one individual has done more to delegitimise the state and subvert the rule of law in SA this past year than Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. During his nine years as president, Zuma’s treachery was hidden by the façade of officialdom. He was protected by a coterie of compromised ministers, submissive law enforcement agencies and an ANC whose moral compass had been jettisoned at the elective conference in Polokwane in 2007, when he assumed leadership of the party. Yet it was only on leaving office that he shrugged off all pretence, and openly rode roughshod over the constitution and the law. In the end, 2021 will be remembered as a year of legal reckoning for the former president: he was jailed for contempt of court, and failed — again — to have the court throw
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financialmail.co.za
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December 16 - December 22, 2021
dence about Zuma’s allies the Guptas, his son Duduzane Zuma, and key ministers and government officials. At first, Zuma sought to have the report and its recommendations set aside on review (he failed). But things only got worse for him: after his chosen successor, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, lost to Cyril Ramaphosa at the 2017 ANC elective conference at Nasrec, one of The tinderbox Ramaphosa’s first tasks as ANC president On July 15 2019, Zuma sat in the witness box was to direct Zuma to set up the at the commission of inquiry into state capture, chaired by deputy What it means: commission. Zuma, powerless without the cover of the ANC preschief justice Raymond Zondo. The key It had been a long road to get question still is: idency, had to comply. Still, it took over a year — after there. Back in 2016, then public will Cyril Ramaprotector Thuli Madonsela recomphosa be ready much wrangling with Zuma’s lawyers, and after more than 40 mended in her “State of Capture” to act on the report that a commission of inquiry Zondo findings witnesses implicated him in wrongdoing — before Zuma finally be set up to probe allegations of — particularly agreed to appear before Zondo on corruption and state capture. Her in an ANC July 15 2019. report contained disturbing evielection year? out arms-deal corruption charges against him. It was also a year in which the deadliest riots this side of apartheid played out across SA — ostensibly in Zuma’s name, and ably cheered on by his children. Once the smoke cleared, more than 300 people lay dead, and the economy, already battered by Covid, was R50bn poorer.
