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 Jacob Zuma has only been President for just over a year, but such has been the drama in his short reign that he feels like he has been around for a decade.
The run up to his election was none smoother: he faced graft charges over a multi-million arms deal, which was dropped just before the April 2009 elections that brought him to power.
Coming into the New Year ,revelations about his sexual behavior and indiscriminate fathering of children outside wedlock left South Africans astounded. His second State of the Nation address was overshadowed by the debate on his rampant infidelity and South Africans welcomed 2010 with news that Zuma was marrying his third wife in his fifth marriage following the death of one and divorce with the current Home Affairs Minister, Nkosazana Dhlamini-Zuma.
Then came revelations that the president had actually fathered a child out of wedlock, just three months before his latest marriage with Sonono Khoza, the divorcee daughter of South Africa’s soccer kingpin, Irvin Khoza, who is the chairman of the FIFA World Cup 2010 Local Organising Committee, now dubbed “Babygate” in local media circles.
But the greatest threat to his bid for second term is the clash with firebrand leader of the African National Congress Youth League, Julius Malema.
Zuma called a press conference to publicly chastise Malema for his comments during a trip to Zimbabwe in which he supported Mugabe’s farm grab regime, his statements on the murder of AWB leader Eugene Terre Blanche, and his verbal abuse of a BBC reporter at an ANCYL press conference.
Emphasising that the youth league was not 'an independent body', Zuma took issues with Malema's defiance of the ANC leadership's instruction to stop singing the 'Shoot the Boer' song, which was popular during the liberation struggle.
A defiant Julius Malema said he was 'shocked' at the public rebuke and dared Zuma and the ANC to charge him.
The ruling party subsequently charged Malema but analysts say Zuma is unlikely to win the battle, with powerful senior leaders of the ANC said to be against the idea. The hearing to discipline Malema started this month, and among the ranks of the ANC youth leader was the ANC Treasurer General, Mathews Phosa, the number four man in the party hierarchy.
Analysts trace Zuma’s trouble to the forces that brought him to power at the party’s congress in Polokwane in 2008.
“The forces that brought Zuma to power were united in one purpose; that was to remove Thabo Mbeki from being ANC leader. That was accomplished so the glue that held them together is not there anymore,” Aubrey Matshiqi, senior research associate at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg told Business Times.
He said not many of those actually wanted Zuma to become State president because some had designs for higher office themselves. Phosa himself challenged Zuma for the ANC’s deputy presidency in 2002, before withdrawing at the 11th hour.
Tokyo Sexwale, a minister in the Zuma administration and part of the ANC’s “Top Six’ is also seen as Malema’s guardian angel.
Zuma also has to negotiate potentially explosive trails with the African National Congress’s increasingly vociferous and militant alliance partners, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
The fall-out with the latter is even greater that the union commissioned a research on the possibility of forming a workers party.
Zuma’s rise to power has left him indebted to a wide variety of stakeholders whose demands are too diverse to accommodate on the same train. South Africa is in for interesting times in the run up to the ANC’s congress to elect a new leader in 2012.
Pull-quote
The forces that brought Zuma to power were united in one purpose; that was to remove Thabo Mbeki from being ANC leader. That was accomplished so the glue that held them together is not there anymore
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