THE THICK END OF THE WEDGE
PETER BRUCE: Jacob Zuma will fail in final lunge at cookie jar
‘What Zuma wants is a year in the Treasury, undisturbed, and then he’ll go’
President Jacob Zuma appears to have offered to step down as president in 2018 if he can get rid of Pravin Gordhan as finance minister now. That at least is how Reuters has two sources telling it. There’s a nice ring to it and it is helpful because it reduces Zuma down to the raw. What he wants is a year in the Treasury, undisturbed, and then he’ll go. In that time, his new finance minister (it really wouldn’t matter who) would raid everything. The Guptas would get their bank and the state-owned companies would get more guarantees and issue more tenders and pay more backhanders to middlemen so that finally Zuma could stand up in the middle of the huge circle of thieves he has created and say, "Right, now, I’ve done everything I can, you all have what I promised you and I have what you promised me. I’m off and if I were you, I would advise the same." But Zuma is doomed. Even if he reshuffles by the time you read this, the one certainty is that he has run out of road. If Reuters is ri...
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