FACTIONAL STRIFE
JONNY STEINBERG: Rough times ahead when Zumaites face prosecution
I hope a proper history of Jacob Zuma’s last year in office is written one day, for it harbours lessons we need to learn. A handful of people know what actually happened, but none has spoken or written publicly. Not yet. How close we came to catastrophe is, for now, a matter of guesswork. We do know that Zuma dusted off old emergency legislation during his final months in office. We know that he was tempted to use it rather than risk defeat at the ANC’s elective conference at Nasrec. He planned, if it became necessary and if he could, to engineer an emergency — or at least to create the impression that SA was descending into anarchy — to postpone indefinitely the elective conference, suspend the rule of law and jail his opponents. We know, also, that the culture of assassination that has long characterised provincial and local politics came pretty close to the national drama. Senior bureaucrats – at the South African Social Security Agency and at institutions that fall under the Tre...
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