CHRIS ROPER: Zuma’s poison plot ploys
Yet another story is doing the rounds about an attempted poisoning of the apparently invincible Jacob Zuma. We need to look beyond the claims to see what benefit he gets from painting himself as a target
Say what you want about Jacob Zuma, but you have to admit he’s not an easy man to poison. I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s claimed someone has poisoned him, or at least attempted to do so. There was the time in 2014, for instance, when there were accusations that his former wife, Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, had poisoned him on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies. The usual suspects were named, if memory serves me. The CIA and MI6, I think, though not Smersh for some reason.
The Mercury reported in 2017 that Zuma told members of the ANC national executive committee that there had been three attempts to poison him. “I was poisoned and almost died just because South Africa joined Brics under my leadership; they said I was going to destroy the country,” he reportedly said. Well, they weren’t that far out on the destroying the country bit, whoever “they” might have been...
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