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In a statement released by his foundation this week, former president Jacob Zuma said that he hoped that “our citizens finally get some certainty and closure as to the real beneficiaries of the arms deal, if any corruption in that regard did occur”.
The statement followed the withdrawal of his Constitutional Court appeal against the KwaZulu-Natal High Court’s refusal to allow him to challenge its refusal to appeal against its decision to deny him the right to challenge his right to launch yet another challenge against the right of the National Prosecuting Authority to proceed with the criminal case against him, which he had previously tried to have quashed but failed because his many challenges had already failed in the high courts, the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court, but then not being satisfied with this, he once more tried to go through all these different tiers of courts with trials within trials to try to achieve the same result, which had no chance in hell of succeeding because he was basically using the same decrepit argument that he was the victim of a political conspiracy because he is this wonderful revolutionary who is feared from east to west and loves the poor more than the poor love themselves, and who had been unfairly dealt with by imperialist running dogs and the remnants of the apartheid state, and how everybody was against him except perhaps his myriad wives, Carl Niehaus and some rag-tag band of supporters who turn up for fried chicken and a free ride in a Quantum bus.
Anyway, Zuma was to appear in the KwaZulu-Natal High Court in Pietermaritzburg on Wednesday to finally answer to 783 counts of fraud, corruption and racketeering.
The trial will not proceed on the day given, inter alia, the fact that he has a revamped legal line-up that will probably need time to familiarise itself with the case, and align the legal strategy of the attorneys and counsel.
Read: Jacob Zuma deserves 'uttermost professionalism'
There is also the small matter of the lockdown, which has added complications to the already complex business of running courts.
The legal teams may still turn up just to honour the court and formalise the rescheduled date, which is expected to be the end of June.
Nevertheless, this marks the end of the Stalingrad era of Zuma’s defence.
For at 15 years, he has used every trick in the legal and extra-legal book to frustrate his right to be cleared of the damning allegations against himself.
Nothing wrong with this at all. He had the right – and our money – to do everything possible to avoid court.
The thing is, this was strange behaviour from someone who repeatedly professed his eagerness to clear his name.
Even more bizarre was that he would then turn around and cite the length of the trial as proof of the unfairness of the process.
It was a persecution, not a prosecution, he claimed.
He has also repeatedly mischaracterised the nature of his trial.
Whenever he’s addressed his supporters, he’s claimed he was being prosecuted in connection with an arms deal that was concluded when he was still serving in the KwaZulu-Natal government as the economic development MEC and, therefore, far from the hurly-burly of national government.
In terms of this logic, he could not have had anything to do with the multibillion-rand arms deal that was concluded in the late 1990s.
This argument would make sense if he was in fact being charged for alleged involvement in actual arms deal corruption.
But he is not.
The charges against Zuma and French arms company Thales relate to the period after the arms deal was signed in 1999.
Let’s take a few steps back.
After the arms deal was concluded, reports of backhanders and the like began to emerge.
Nothing unusual there. All arms deals are corrupt and have been since cavemen started trading stone clubs.
If claims that ours was 100% legit are true, then we South Africans are more special than we are letting on.
We may have produced a Nelson Mandela, performed the first heart transplant and are the home of the gilded Orlando Pirates Football Club, but that achievement would be really special.
The facts, which Zuma and his fans obfuscate, are that the arms deal part of the trial relates to his agreement in 2000 to use his power as the then new deputy president of the republic to protect Thales from investigations and prosecution.
For this, Zuma was to be rewarded handsomely by Thales, the business partners to his friend and financial adviser Schabir Shaik.
This is what he will have to answer for, not the arms deal negotiations.
Zuma will also have to answer for his sickeningly filthy relationship with Shaik when he was MEC in KwaZulu-Natal, details of which are contained in extensive paper trails that the dodgy businessman had kept as future insurance and others that investigators dug up.
When Zuma threatens to reveal “the real beneficiaries of the arms deal”, this is very welcome.
This can only be good for South Africa and it would be a very patriotic thing to do.
Pity he did not do it when he was running the country between 2009 and 2018, a time when he, as a citizen and a head of state, had a duty to report wrongdoing to the law enforcement authorities for investigation.
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