R700,000 – and was granted a loan by First National Bank. His KZN business friend Vivian Reddy signed surety for the loan and serviced the payments for the first year. Zuma started construction on the first phase of the homestead shortly afterwards – without having any money to do so.
Benefactors showered Zuma with white envelopes while banks were at his feet. When the cash-starved politician approached ABSA in the late 1990s to open an account, his bad credit record with Standard Bank and Nedbank should have disqualified him. But the business centre manager wrote in a memorandum that Zuma was likely to be elected South Africa's deputy president soon and that his “bank balance was the last item on his mind, with more important matters regarding the country and the province to focus on”.
Within three months, Zuma's account was heavily overdrawn.
* * *
The decision by the post-1994 ANC government to re-equip the new South African National Defence Force led to the controversial multibillion-rand arms deal. Without facing any external threat, the government embarked on a mission to buy corvettes, submarines and fighter aircraft. Arms deals are notorious for bribing corrupt politicians. The South African arms deal was no different and was from the outset riddled with fraud, bribes and kickbacks to the ANC. The serial debtor Jacob Zuma was in the front of the line for his slice of the pie.
The Sunday Times and M&G revealed that in 2000 Zuma allegedly accepted a R500,000-a-year bribe from the French arms company Thales. Thales's South African subsidiary, Thint, had won a R2.6 billion contract in 1997 to fit four new navy frigates with its weapons systems. Thales also generously contributed to the ANC coffers. In April 2006, Thales wrote a cheque for €1 million (about R15 million at today's exchange rate) for the ANC to be paid from a Dubai bank account into an “ANC-aligned trust”.
Another Zuma benefactor was former president Nelson Mandela, who came to Zuma's rescue in June 2005 with a R1 million payment. This was made just nine days after President Mbeki had fired Zuma as his deputy and shortly after the NPA announced Zuma's prosecution. Zuma was at the time overdrawn by more than R400,000. The M&G reported that Mandela had identified Zuma early on as a financial “problem child” and had attempted to “discipline” him about his financial conduct.
KPMG said in their report that Zuma profited from a host of meal tickets other than those given by Shaik and Mandela. These payments amounted to at least another R3 million. According to the M&G, it appeared that Zuma might also have benefited from another arms deal company, Ferrostaal, which clinched the submarine contract.
In May 2005, Schabir Shaik was convicted of fraud and corruption in the Durban High Court. He alleged that he gave Zuma loans and didn't charge interest because it “offended his religious conviction”. Judge Hilary Squires would have none of it and sentenced Shaik to 15 years' imprisonment. The trial court found in the context of the corruption charges that the evidence established a “mutually beneficial symbiosis” between Shaik and Zuma.
Shaik tried his luck in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) but a full bench confirmed the sentence and said Shaik “subverted his friendship with Zuma into a relationship of patronage designed to achieve power and wealth”. Shaik used Zuma's name to intimidate people, and particularly potential business partners, into submitting to his will. The SCA concluded: “In our view, the sustained corrupt relationship over the years had the effect that Shaik could use one of the most powerful politicians in the country when it suited him.”
You don't have to be a lawyer to grasp the significance of the court's judgment: that there was a crooked, conniving and reciprocal relationship between Zuma and his benefactor, and they therefore shared equal guilt.
Books have been written and newspapers have been filled with revelations around Zuma's alleged corruption (the only reason why I use the word “alleged” is that he has not yet been convicted). The evidence is compelling and devastating, yet when asked in an interview whether he is crooked, Zuma said: “Me? Well, I don't know, I must go to a dictionary and learn what a crook is. I've never been a crook.”
* * *
They were once closer than brothers; once described as being like “tongue and saliva”. But when they tasted the lure of power, the gloves came off and the camaraderie broke apart. Much has been written about this period in South Africa, and scholars and authors agree that Thabo Mbeki had a low opinion of the “poorly educated peasant”. Mbeki's “imperial” and “removed” manner of governing was also light years away from Zuma's more “hands-on” and tribal approach to politics.
Mbeki was forced to tolerate Zuma, who was after all hand-picked by Mandela to be his successor's right-hand man. But once Mbeki was re-elected in 2004, he wanted to bury Zuma. Both leaders drew their daggers. Mbeki relied on his intelligence network, the Scorpions and the NPA to finish Zuma off.
Mbeki underestimated Zuma's access to an “alternative” intelligence network. To understand this, we must go back to the late 1980s to the exiled ANC's Operation Vula, in which Jacob Zuma played a leading role. Vula was arguably the most successful ANC intelligence operation ever, infiltrating extensive numbers of agents back into South Africa in heavy disguise. When it was uncovered in July 1990, Vula operated as a virtually distinct intelligence network within the ANC. The Shaik brothers played a key role in it and ran Operation Bible. Moe Shaik would later become Zuma's foreign intelligence chief. Other key operatives were Mac Maharaj (later Zuma's presidential spokesperson), Siphiwe Nyanda (later Zuma's communications minister), Nathi Mthethwa (Zuma's police minister) and Solly Shoke (Zuma's army chief).
By the mid-2000s, conspiracies and intrigues abounded. They were usually works of fiction with a splatter of truth and were leaked at strategic times, such as just before an ANC elective conference. The Zuma camp instigated its own dirty tricks campaign. Two weeks after the state had announced that the NPA was about to hurl Schabir Shaik before a judge, City Press ran an article that prosecutions boss Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy. As I have mentioned before, Moe Shaik later confirmed that he was behind the allegations in order “to defend the honour of the deputy president”.
Then came the Browse Mole report (discussed in Chapter Two) and the hoax e-mails. In around 2005, e-mails started circulating among ANC NEC members and journalists that supporters of Mbeki were hatching a plot to permanently remove Zuma from the political scene. These fake e-mails seem to have been created and released by a pro-Zuma faction in the intelligence community to boost Zuma in the ANC succession battle.
These plots allowed Zuma to appear as a presidential hopeful under siege while Mbeki and his henchman were revealed as nothing but schemers and manipulators. Zuma said in an interview that it was his concern for “the masses and the poor” that prompted his political enemies to try to deny him the ANC leadership and the presidency.
* * *
Zuma is light on his feet. We have all seen him dancing: his fists clenched, his arms arched forward like the tusks of an elephant, and his body hunched while “awuleth' umshini wami” (bring me my machine gun) stirs from his mouth. In front of him are thousands of ecstatic and swaying followers, tooting on horns, blowing on whistles, and swaying back and forth to old anti-apartheid tunes.
If Zuma was a career boxer, he would have tiptoed around the ring, his gloves held high and his chin straight and square. Every time Zuma seems to be out on his feet and with his adversaries pummelling away at his bullet-shaped head, he is at his most dangerous. That is when he answers with nasty uppercuts and smashing right-handers, which have sent the likes of Thabo Mbeki staggering across the ring. He has an incredible ability to cheat political defeat and to emerge with his fists in the air.
On 16 December 2007, at the ANC's national conference in Polokwane, both Mbeki and Zuma allowed their names to be put forward for the party's presidency, the first time in half a century that the post had been contested. A curt-looking Mbeki, a short man with an elfin-like appearance and overgrown eyebrows, seemed startled to find himself in Zuma's company.
By the time the ANC delegates had settled in, Mbeki should have been assured of victory. Zuma was a tainted and divisive candidate with corruption charges hanging over his head. He should have been finally counted out at Polokwane, but he