Zuma’s high-stakes chicken game with ConCourt must be dealt with 

It would be easy – looking at the images of supporters of former president Jacob Zuma clamouring around him in Nkandla ready to protect him from arrest – to conclude that South Africa is teetering on the edge of civil war.

That, though, would be exactly what Zuma and his minions (well-versed in the art of PR hype, as they were taught by white London outfit Bell Pottinger) would want you to think.

It’s all part of the strategy to portray himself and his “people” as being the wounded victims of capricious injustice and who are willing to fight, supposedly in the time-honoured Zulu way, for their “freedom”.

In playing a high-stakes game of “chicken” with the law – and refusing to report to start his 15-month jail sentence, as ordered by the Constitutional Court – Zuma needs to give the appearance of having something to wager with.

He, of course, cares little that the loyal people congregating at his KwaZulu-Natal homestead may well be granted their wish to die for him … because the likelihood of contracting the virulent delta strain of Covid-19 in the super-spreader events there is high.

One must be wary, though, of extrapolating the illegal gathering in Nkandla to how the entire “Zulu nation” feels, or, indeed, how the rest of ordinary South Africa feels.

Despite the best efforts of Zuma and his faction to push the “radical economic transformation” and “white monopoly capital” narratives, many South Africans are not fooled and can see him for what he is: Kingpin of a network set up to loot an entire country.

However, at the same time, one must not dismiss Zuma’s potential to sow more dissent, using tribalism on top of race this time.

The government must not blink on this one.

They must stare down Zuma and apply the full force of the law.