President Zuma truly has no clothes

At this juncture, it cannot logically be argued that President Jacob Zuma is still in touch with the grassroots electorate who put him in his exalted position.

The very fact that service delivery protests continue to spring up like angry mushrooms across the country questions the validity of his increasingly ivory tower isolation. His being booed – and essentially sent packing from the recent trade union federation Cosatu’s May Day celebrations in Bloemfontein – is a signal token that the gulf between Zuma and the people he must serve is reaching unbridgeable proportions.

His no-show for an address in the troubled community of Vuwani yesterday merely serves to underline this. Apart from the posse of faithful apostles, Zuma has surrounded himself with in a calamitous Cabinet reshuffle.

The president has been left like the fabled emperor, left standing with no clothes, the tatters of the tripartite alliance giving him no cover.

Former finance minister Trevor Manuel, a pillar of the struggle against the divisive evils of apartheid, during his keynote address at the Kader Asmal Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town at the weekend, called on a rebuilding of the ANC and rejected the present structure within the party that “exists to protect one person who happens to be serial wrongdoer”.

Given that the economy is in crisis, that we have sold off a large slice of our strategic oil reserves at ridiculously low discount prices, and that the average citizen is increasingly bearing the brunt of what most hold to be self-seeking decisions by the elite of the ruling party, the popular displeasure is fully understandable. More damning was Manuel’s cynically caustic reference to the leaders owning a copy of the Constitution.

“We might have to say it is an intelligence report,” he said, adding that if they read it, they would stop violating it.