POINT OF ORDER
TIM COHEN: How dirty tricks show Jacob Zuma camp’s anxiety
‘Cyril Ramaphosa’s problem is not his marital infidelity; it is the same as it has always been: Marikana’
How will the Sunday news disclosures about Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s affair or affairs affect the leadership race? It’s a much more difficult question to answer than it seems at first glance. Instinctively, you would say they will affect his chances negatively, which is obviously the reason they were leaked by the Zuma camp. The disclosures, if that’s what they are (Ramaphosa says he had one affair, which ended years ago; the Sunday Independent suggests affairs with six people) would, you might think, tend to support the campaign of President Jacob Zuma’s former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, since it would enhance the attractiveness of the campaign of the dowdy mother figure.At the very least, the disclosures would help Dlamini-Zuma since they might pare off some of Ramaphosa’s support to the other candidates, which would tend to boost her proportion of the vote. The problem with this argument is that I just don’t think having an affair is a needle-moving event in the conte...
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