Nelson Mandela went to jail for over 30 yrs....

....for this?

The rise of Jacob Zuma; polygamist, ‘Zulu peasant’ and president in waiting
He is branded a ‘bumbling clown’ and faces the threat of a bribery trial, yet is set to lead South Africa. Meet the man behind the caricatures
It was May 10, 1994. The whole world had come to Pretoria to see the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected South African president. The march past was led by the army, and nine air force Mirages flew overhead, dipping their wings in salute. Mandela spoke of “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world at large”.

The euphoria that day was completely overblown, of course, and the sense of anticlimax was correspondingly deep. The formal economy shrank. Crime soared. Begging at traffic lights - by all races - became a general phenomenon.

President Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, won notoriety as an Aids denier while deaths from the disease rose to 1,000 a day. Government ministers disregarded the basic rationale of democratic capitalism. Politics was haunted by scandal, corruption and cover-up. Many wealthier and better educated South Africans fled as fast as they could.

The economy bounced back but politics did not. This month, after years of turmoil, South Africa will hold an election that seems sure to give it a new president, Jacob Zuma, whose reputation is the opposite of Mandela’s 15 years ago. This earthy populist has been on trial for rape, has left wives and at least 18 children in his wake, is lampooned at home as a bumbling clown and has long been under investigation for alleged corruption. Tomorrow, barely two weeks before the election, prosecutors will announce whether or not they are dropping bribery charges against him.

Whatever their decision, Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, has declared Zuma “unfit to become president”. Mbeki has dismissed him as “a Zulu peasant” who would make South Africa “a neo-colonial basket case”.

Is this the end of the “rainbow” dream and the moment South Africa starts to become a greater Zimbabwe? Not necessarily. Although Zuma is portrayed as an ignorant sexist who has clawed his way to the top, there is more to him than the caricatures and calumnies suggest.

A couple of months ago the official spokesman of the African National Congress (ANC) denounced as “lies” reports that Zuma, the party president, was to marry a fifth wife. It turned out to be true, however - and there were soon reports that he was courting a sixth. While the ANC is embarrassed, Zuma is unusual in his frank acknowledgment of his own polygamy. In the eyes of many educated Africans, this is a shameful sign of his cultural backwardness, but among the less educated - Zuma’s natural followers - polygamy is more easily accepted.

Other ANC leaders are far less open about their own multiple wives and mistresses, ex-wives and unacknowledged and hidden children. Officially, Mandela has been serially monogamous with three consecutive wives. But it is no secret that when he was young he was a philanderer on a large scale and there are rumours of illegitimate children. Mbeki was also known to be a ladies’ man on an almost industrial scale.

The incident that has most damaged Zuma’s reputation was an accusation of rape three years ago. He was found not guilty at his trial, which appeared to be the result of a honeytrap set by political enemies, but he admitted having unprotected sex with the young woman while knowing she was HIV positive.

Feminists were outraged by Zuma’s excuse that the young woman had seemed keen to seduce him and was wearing a short skirt, as well as by his offhand assurance that he had showered after sex as an anti-Aids precaution.

Zuma’s sympathisers are not suggesting he is a paragon of virtue but that his sexual behaviour - and honesty about it - should be seen in context. The same applies to his politics and the corruption charges.

Widely portrayed as a leftist firebrand, Zuma is in fact a rather complex figure. He was born in 1942 in the deep Zulu countryside, the son of a policeman and a domestic servant. After his father died, he worked as a cattle herder and, unable to continue school through lack of money, followed his mother to Durban where he became a “kitchen boy”. He was an eager student at political classes laid on by the ANC and the Communist party.

Zuma joined the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), when it was formed in 1962 but was arrested trying to leave the country for military training and was brutally beaten by the police. He was jailed for 10 years for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid regime and was imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island, where his political education was nurtured and his genial personality won friends.

Ebrahim Ebrahim, a former cell-mate, said: “He has always been a likeable person with a big laugh. He’s always cheerful. People always tended to be around him.”

On his release in 1974 he worked in the ANC underground before going into exile. He rose through the MK’s ranks after military training in the Soviet Union and led the ANC’s intelligence wing.

When he returned to South Africa in 1990 it was with a reputation as a fearless fighter and militant communist who had learnt to read and write English from Harry Gwala, his mentor and fellow Zulu.

Gwala was the ANC warlord of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, where a bloody civil war had raged with the rival Inkatha movement for more than a decade. He was a ruthless killer who cut down not only the enemy but also rivals on his own side.

On the ANC’s instructions, Zuma edged out Gwala - surviving the old man’s attempts to kill him - and then showed himself to be moderate and conciliatory, ending the civil war and joining Chief Buthelezi of Inkatha to celebrate Shaka Day in loincloth and leopard skins.

During the early years after Mandela became president there was a great deal of distrust within the ANC as rivals jockeyed for power and wealth, some settling their differences violently. Mbeki was essentially running the country as vice-president and was preoccupied with clearing the way for his own succession to Mandela. Zuma was an Mbeki loyalist. In his eyes nothing, not even South Africa’s new constitution, was above the ANC.

When Winnie Mandela, the president’s disgraced but still influential former wife, made an unauthorised challenge for the party's vice-presidential nomination, Mbeki steered it Zuma’s way instead. Many greeted with virtual stupefaction the idea of Zuma - probably the least educated of the ANC elite - becoming the country’s No 2. He had been an administrative disaster as a provincial cabinet minister in KwaZulu-Natal.

Mandela himself cautioned Mbeki that Zuma was seen as so close to him that to choose him would simply reinforce Mbeki’s reputation for wanting only yes men. This advice was, of course, ignored. If no one could imagine Zuma as president, Mbeki thought he could safely pick him with no fear that he would become a rival. So how did Zuma become Mbeki’s nemesis and South Africa’s next president?

The answer lies in a scandal known in South Africa simply as “the arms deal”.

In its days in exile, the ANC’s membership had included principled heroes, Stalinist apparatchiks and plain thugs. Among those regarded as a thug was Joe Modise, the head of MK. When I interviewed operatives of the old apartheid security police years later, I found they universally agreed that he had also been an informer for the white regime.

Modise was determined to become the first ANC defence minister, a post he saw as a passport to great wealth. The greatest threat to his ambition was Chris Hani, his No 2 in MK, a charismatic and militant leftwinger. Hani was an obvious candidate for defence minister and was so popular with the ANC rank and file that he even seemed likely to overtake Mbeki in the race to be Mandela’s vice-president and eventual president.

In the infighting with Hani, Modise threw all his weight behind Mbeki. The alliance between them was the pivot on which ANC politics turned. Mbeki seemed oblivious to Modise’s unsavoury reputation and was happy to embrace him - and in future years would risk his name by continuing to stand up for him.

In April 1993, two weeks after he had threatened to expose Modise for stealing £2.5m from the ANC, Hani was assassinated. The killer was a Polish immigrant from the far right. But few thought he had acted alone.

It has since emerged that the National Intelligence Service, a key arm of the outgoing white regime, had advance warning. I also learnt there had been a plot within the ANC itself to kill Hani. The names of various ANC leaders were ascribed to the plot, including Modise’s.

On becoming defence minister in 1994, Modise was in no doubt that he had been handed the keys of the kingdom and proceeded to take advantage of this in a highly predictable way. In effect he was allowed to do as he liked.

Mbeki was head of the cabinet committee on the multi-billion-dollar arms deal that Modise signed. When there was a hue and cry over alleged corruption and demands for an independent inquiry, he used the full weight of the presidential office to force even allegedly independent bodies and institutions into line.

Modise died in 2001 but the arms deal - and its association with the Hani assassination - continue to overshadow political life.

In the 1980s and early 1990s many of the white elite who rubbed shoulders with Mbeki had come away impressed. After succeeding Mandela in 1999, however, he became arrogant and inaccessible. Even Mandela found that for months Mbeki would not take his calls.

By late 2000 the collapse in confidence in Mbeki was visible in the polls, particularly for his views on Aids. Already there was murmuring that perhaps even Zuma, the uneducated vice-president, would make a better president. The gossip ignited Mbeki’s paranoia. His recovery strategy consisted of preemptive attacks on anyone considered a possible threat or rival, including Zuma.

The National Prosecuting Authority (and the special police unit, the Scorpions, that fell under it) began a formal investigation of Zuma’s possible involvement in corruption linked to the arms deal. The case centres on accusations that he accepted bribes for protecting Thales, the French arms company.

This investigation, which involved an enormous commitment of the scarce time, money and man-power of an already overstretched police force, could not possibly have started - or continued - without strong presidential backing.

In 2005 Zuma was dismissed as vice-president after his financial adviser was convicted of corruption. But, with the backing of the left, he began a political fightback against the unpopular Mbeki. The war between them became more vicious.

On the eve of an ANC conference in 2007 - at which Zuma was preparing to challenge Mbeki for the party leadership - details of a suicide note left by one of his wives were sent to the media. She described “24 years of hell” while married to him.

Despite the smears and numerous attempts to prosecute, Zuma crushed Mbeki and seized the ANC leadership, thanks to strong backing from the leftist groups that still mourned Hani.

Within 10 days the Scorpions served Zuma an indictment to stand trial for racketeering, money laundering, corruption and fraud. Last September a judge threw out the charges on a procedural point and added that he believed political interference had played a role in the charges - a comment that enabled the ANC to force Mbeki to resign.

The judgment was later reversed - but not Mbeki’s resignation - and the drama continues to go up to the wire as the prosecuting authority keeps the nation waiting this weekend for its decision on whether or not to continue the case.

When they finally get to vote on April 22, South Africans will be able to choose between the ANC and a breakaway group, the Congress of the People, as well as more than 20 other parties. Nobody seems in much doubt, however, that the ANC will win and the new parliament will elect Zuma as president.

What kind of leader will he make? Whereas Mbeki is a man of ideas but often uncomfortable with people, Zuma is barely educated but has a warm, genial presence - a man who is happy in his own skin.

Talking about his long fight with Mbeki, he said: “There were times when I just wondered how on earth am I going to navigate my way through this? Every part of the state machine was out to get me.”

He added that while “I knew I was innocent, I also knew that wasn’t enough. Sometimes, when I realised there was year after year of this to come, I couldn’t even talk to friends about how high a wall I faced”.

It is no secret that Mandela finds Mbeki difficult but has a soft spot for Zuma and I can see why - Zuma talks the same language of reconciliation: “We have to make all South Africans, no matter what their race, feel they have a contribution to make, that they’re wanted here and that they’ll be protected here.”