It seems ‘some people’ heading for a tough time, says Zuma in suspected Ramaphosa jibe

Former president Jacob Zuma has been at the receiving end of insults and applause following a social media post that left many speculating on whether he was mocking President Cyril Ramaphosa’s dilemma with Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane.

He said in Zulu: [loosely translated] “Yoo Guys, things are bad! Chickens have come home to roost! It seems some people are heading for very tough time indeed.”

Webakwethu!! Kubi!Iyabhubhudl’inkezo.

Iwa libheke Umoya.

Sengathi bakhona abazoyikhotha imbenge yomile.

— Jacob G Zuma (@PresJGZuma) August 12, 2019

While some of his social media followers applauded him for entertaining them, some quite obviously wondered if he was talking about Ramaphosa. They were also quick to remind him of his previous court cases and allegations that eventually led to some of his ANC comrades calling for a vote of no confidence in him.

Ekurhuleni mayor Mzwandile Masina, a staunch Zuma supporter, who has been vocal about his disapproval of some of Ramaphosa’s actions, once called one of Zuma’s interviews “prophetic”. In the interview, Zuma warned that those who had called for the commission of inquiry into state capture would regret it.

He said: “There is going to be a commission of inquiry with a broad kind of terms of reference that will cover everything because we don’t want to leave out anything. Through that process I am sure, those who are corrupt, they will come out. Even those who are saying ‘let it come’, who are using political phrases to say ‘let it come’. They might regret. They will regret! That’s the point I made because it’s not going to be choosy, it’s going to go to those who have done wrong things.”

Mkhwebane has found Ramaphosa guilty of “inadvertently misleading” parliament over his R500,000 campaign donation from Bosasa.

She also found that Ramaphosa and his campaign team may have become part of money laundering activities, since the donation from controversial Bosasa CEO Gavin Watson had gone through a number of intermediary companies to reach them.

Part of the remedial action stipulated in the report was that Ramaphosa must reveal all his CR17 funders in parliament.

The president and the public protector are currently engaged in a dispute over the attempts of Ramaphosa’s lawyers to keep this financial information private, though the Sunday Independent in any event leaked most of it yesterday, with allegations that they’d been given the information directly by the public protector’s office.

Ramaphosa’s team wrote to the High Court in Pretoria last week to request that details linked to banks accounts intended for the CR17 campaign not be made public, arguing that they should only be made available to the court and the respondents.

This follows a News24 report in which emails appeared to show that Ramaphosa’s claim that he had no knowledge of who funded the CR17 campaign was at least partially untrue.

In a statement on Saturday, the presidency confirmed that confidential banking information about the contributors to and recipients from Ramaphosa’s CR17 campaign had been leaked to the media.

Spokesperson Khusela Diko said the information, supposedly held only by the public protector, included bank statements of third parties, which had recorded private transactions and which were “strictly confidential”.

Today, Ramaphosa obtained an urgent interim interdict on the implementation of the remedial action stipulated by Mkhwebane.

(Background reporting by Daniel Friedman)

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