The top three Nkandla flip-flops

The ANC has reneged on a promise to invite SA into Nkandla by way of the media - but as a flip-flop it hardly registers compared to previous examples.

ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe on Monday said the ANC would not, in fact, be arranging a media visit to Nkandla to show the country the truth about President Jacob Zuma's homestead.

The decision to invite South Africa into Nkandla, Mantashe said, had been reversed "because it became quite clear when we wanted to do that there were processes that were outstanding", including investigations by the Special Investigating Unit, possibly the Hawks, and a report by Zuma to Parliament. "Our view in hindsight, we took a view ... [to] not interfere with that space," he said.

Mantashe first said the ANC would arrange a visit to Nkandla in the interests of transparency before the end of last week.

"As we had committed when the report of the [internal government Nkandla investigation] was released, we will be inviting members of the media on a visit to the Prestige Project in Nkandla in the next week so that we can talk to the real issues beyond the report," Mantashe said on March 20.

But after the ANC's national executive committee met this past weekend, the ANC said various actions it could take, or demands it could make of Zuma, would amount to disrespect for constitutional institutions.

The reversal is the latest in a long line of flip-flops from the ANC, Zuma and various Cabinet ministers when it comes to Nkandla – and cancelling a media visit ranks well down the list. Some of the most notable include:

The president's bond documents are (not) available for inspection In November 

Zuma told Parliament that a bank funded his family's work on Nkandla. In an emotional session he defended himself fiercely against Nkandla allegations. "I am still paying a bond on the first phase of my home," said Zuma.

The presidency followed that up with a written media statement acknowledging requests for proof that the bond exists. "The evidence will be readily made available to an authorised agency or institution empowered by the law of the land," said presidential spokesperson Mac Maharaj.

After she, like many media organisations, could find no solid proof of the existence of such a bond, public protector Thuli Madonsela pointed Zuma to the statement, making it clear that her office surely qualifies.

"You will respectfully agree with me that this includes the public protector," Madonsela says she told Zuma, after multiple requests for the documents.

Zuma responded that the bond predated his taking office as president, so he could not see how the documents could be of interest in Madonsela's investigation.

"Accordingly, I hold the view that the disclosure you seek would be unnecessary," Zuma wrote to Madonsela.

The top-secret report that wasn't

In January 2013, Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi released the results of the interministerial task team investigation into Nkandla, colloquially known as the government Nkandla report. The top finding: Zuma was neither culpable nor involved in the Nkandla scandal, and had not received personal benefit.

The actual report, however, was classified top-secret; so replete with security-sensitive information that it could not even be released in a redacted form.

The secrecy was strictly maintained. Parliament dealt with the report in a closed committee that handles matters of national security. Madonsela, during her investigation, was only given sight of the document and not allowed to make a copy.

But in December 2013 the ANC, by way of Mantashe, asked that the full report be released. Government announced just days later that it would release the report, and that was duly done. No adequate explanation was ever provided for the classification of the report, or for the change of heart.

Key point. No, ministerial handbook. No, actually, neither

The legal basis for the government spending, as it turned out nearly R250-million on Nkandla, has changed often enough to strain the definition of "flip-flop".

Initially the government said the work was done in terms of the apartheid-era National Key Points Act (NKPA), which also demanded secrecy regarding the improvements. That was reversed, if only in part, after it was pointed out that the NKPA would require Zuma to foot most of the bill, or for the money spent by the state to be drawn from a special account.

At other points Nxesi, as the de facto spokesperson on Nkandla, said the upgrades had been in terms of the Ministerial Handbook, a supposedly secret document that outlines the perks available to members of Cabinet. But the document had been published previously by the Mail & Guardian, and made no mention of presidential security. It did clearly say that state spending on the security of ministers at their private residences was capped at R100 000.

With little achieved other than making the point that the Nkandla bill was over 2000 times more than what was considered adequate for the tier of national leaders, that argument was also abandoned.

- M&G

Zuma: I did nothing wrong

Cape Town - President Jacob Zuma broke his silence on the Nkandla report on Sunday – two weeks after it had been released by Public Protector Thuli Madonsela.

“I did not use the public’s money in Nkandla. What I’m saying is I’m not guilty. Even if they look for me under a tree they can’t find me. I did nothing wrong. I did not do anything,” Zuma told a crowd in Gugulethu in footage broadcast by ANN7 on Sunday.

“They go around and say this fella used public money. I am not guilty, there is no case against me. I am a person just like you.”

Zuma said the tuck shop at Nkandla was opened by his first wife a long time ago and she had used to it support herself while he was in exile.

He and other leaders of the ANC held a series of rallies and meetings and campaigned door-to-door in communities across Cape Town on Sunday.

ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa visited Crossroads and Mitchells Plain, while deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte campaigned in Imizamo Yethu, Hout Bay.

ANC treasurer-general, Zweli Mkhize attended a Bantu Church of Christ service in Khayelitsha, while ANC national chairwoman Baleka Mbete met residents of Dunoon.

Secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said the party had done all it should in terms of Mandonsela’s findings on Nkandla.

Speaking on the sidelines of an ANC rally in Langa on Sunday, he denied weekend newspaper reports that said the party’s national executive committee (NEC) had decided that then-defence and military veterans minister Lindiwe Sisulu and Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa would shoulder some of the responsibility for Nkandla.

“I was in the meeting and that was not discussed, nor did we make such a decision. All the NEC did was to acknowledge that we have done what we should do as the ANC,” Mantashe said.

He said the party would monitor only the actions by ministries, the Presidency or the Special Investigating Unit as it implemented the recommendations of the public protector’s report.

In Chatsworth, Durban, Zuma’s spokesman, Mac Maharaj, said the media had been making a mountain out of a molehill about a “non-issue”.

Speaking at a dinner on Saturday to raise funds for the ANC’s election campaign, he said: “You (the media) are making an issue out of something that is not big. You are telling the people that the matter is big.”

Asked whether Zuma had considered returning the money as recommended by the public protector, Maharaj said Zuma would make this known when he responded to the report.

Zuma was in jovial spirits as he visited residents in KwaKiki, Gugulethu. His cavalcade of nine cars pulled up in a street only a few metres wide. Zuma got out and walked for about 200m. He stopped several times to greet residents.

At Nozulu Braai, one of the first places he visited on this walkabout, he asked manager Lungisile Mbeki if he was registered to vote, and what the government could do to improve his life.

“I told the president I wanted to grow my business. The government must help me do that,” he said.

Mbeki runs his business from a container. He said Zuma’s visit reaffirmed his support for the ANC.

Zuma then addressed a crowd from a stage on the back of a truck parked opposite the taxi rank.

He emphasised the importance of voting, but added: “If you vote for another party that knows it would not win, you are throwing away your vote. It will not change the situation of people.”

Zuma said the ANC had experience in running the government. It knew what the problems were and how to fix them.

The ANC was ready to win back the Western Cape and it welcomed former members back, Zuma said.

Cope MPL Mbulelo Ncedana, who left the ANC in 2008, rejoined the party at a rally in Langa.

cobus.coetzee@inl.co.za

bongani.hans@inl.co.za

- Cape Times and The Mercury

Zuma: I never asked for Nkandla upgrade

President Jacob Zuma said on Sunday that he did not ask for the multi-million-rand state-funded makeover of his Nkandla home after an ombudsman found that he unduly benefited from the renovations.

The ombudsman said the R246-million spent on the renovations at Zuma's rural homestead was excessive and ordered him to repay some of the costs.

But in his first public reaction to the damning report released 11 days ago, Zuma shifted the blame to government officials, saying he did not ask for the renovations and he would not repay.

“They did this without telling me,” he was shown saying in local vernacular on the local private television ANN7. “So why should I pay for something I did not ask for?”

He was speaking casually during a door-to-door campaign in Gugulethu, outside Cape Town, for the May 7 vote in which he is seeking re-election.

The cost of the refurbishments, which include a helipad, a swimming pool and even a chicken coop, have ballooned to R246m from the initial estimate of R65-million in 2009.

It was the first time Zuma commented publicly on the so-called “Nkandlagate”.

Already his ruling African National Congress, whose popularity is flagging ahead of May 7 elections, has said officials implicated in the scandal should be called to account.

The opposition Democratic Alliance has launched a criminal corruption case against Zuma over the upgrades and plans impeachment proceedings.

The splurge on the house - nestled in the verdant hills of Zuma's KwaZulu-Natal political stronghold - has caused anger in a country where there is widespread poverty and where 10 million people live on welfare. 

- Sapa-AFP

Institute for Accountability calls for Zuma's resignation

The Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa has urged the ANC to ask President Jacob Zuma to resign or recall him as presidential candidate for the May elections.

In a letter to ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe, the institute said the Public Protector's findings that Zuma had unduly benefited from state-funded work on his private Nkandla homestead in KwaZulu-Natal, and the shadow of corruption charges linked to the 1999 arms deal, made Zuma unfit for the post.

"We would urge you and your colleagues on the national executive committee [NEC] of the ANC to reconsider the implications of persisting with JZ [Jacob Zuma] as your presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections and to give serious attention to recalling him as presidential candidate if he does not opt to voluntarily resign," the institute's director Paul Hoffman wrote.

He said this would be the best way for the African National Congress to convince voters that it remained committed to the rule of law and the Constitution.

He warned the ruling party faced the risk that corruption charges against Zuma could be reinstated in the next five years, if the Democratic Alliance's court review of the withdrawal of the charges shortly before the last elections succeeded.

Given this, and Zuma's track record in office, Hoffman said it would be irrational to have him run for a second term.

"The problem is that JZ is so compromised and in such an unmanageable conflict of interest position that he is effectively incapable of properly fulfilling his obligations, duties and functions as president of the country."

The NEC is due to meet this weekend.

- Timeslive

M&G releases e-book 'Nkandla: The Great Unravelling'

Phillip de Wet's e-book "Nkandla: The Great Unravelling" tracks key events and major themes surrounding President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla homestead.

The Mail & Guardian released Nkandla: The Great Unravelling, an M&G e-book by associate editor Phillip de Wet, that tracks key events and major themes over the past four years during which the R250-million upgrade to President Jacob Zuma's homestead has dominated the news agenda. 

This book does not represent a new piece of investigative journalism. It does not seek to present every fact or every voice. What we have sought to do instead is provide a readable analysis about where the Nkandla tale came from, how it developed, and where it may be headed. 

The story itself broke in bits and pieces over the years, beginning in December 2009. De Wet was assigned the task of bringing this story into context, taking those bits and pieces and weaving them into a comprehensive tale that started at a rough construction site in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, KwaZulu-Natal, and is still playing out loudly on the heels of the recently released public protector’s report, Secure in Comfort.

In the 12 chapters of Nkandla: The Great Unravelling, De Wet sifts through the key issues, difficulties and complexities of the Nkandla story, revealing a compelling story in his distinct, bold and easy-to-read voice that captures the essence of Nkandla – the story that would define a presidency. 

Nkandla: The Great Unravelling is available on Amazon for $2.99 or via Paperight outlets (see paperight.com for more information). 

This is the M&G’s second e-book, the first of which came out last year with the launch of Writing Invisibility: Conversations on the Hidden City, a project in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute and the African Centre for Migration and Society, which can be downloaded free on the M&G website at mg.co.za/acms. 

For general information about the book, please contact Tanya Pampalone on tanyap@mg.co.za. To schedule an interview with Phillip de Wet, please contact him on phillipd2@mg.co.za

- M&G

Nkandla Style!

Wake up and smell what's brewing

The coffee is steaming hot in front of us but we seem to be incapable of smelling it.

The president of the republic, Jacob Zuma, and his family have been found to have benefited massively and improperly from building at his palatial estate at Nkandla.

Upgrades costing R215-million have been completed on Zuma's home and he wants the nation to believe that he did not know about them, had no hand in them and so will not take responsibility for any of them.

With wanton looting of the public purse exposed, the president sits in office with impunity and without shame.

The chairman of the Elections Commission of SA (also known as the IEC), Pansy Tlakula, also does not seem to think her continued presence at the head of the institution undermines its credibility.

With elections due on May 7, Tlakula, has been found - not just by Public Protector Thuli Madonsela but also by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the auditors appointed by the finance minister - to have played a role in the awarding of a tender to a company with which she had links.

Last week she brazenly lectured political parties about good behaviour during the coming elections. This despite the fact that, as reported in this newspaper last week, the PwC report concurred with and vindicated Madonsela's findings.

It said: "Advocate Tlakula, Mr Norman du Plessis, as the deputy chief electoral officer corporate services, and Mr Stephen Langtry, as the manager in office of the CEO, should each be held responsible for the role they played that resulted in a procurement process being followed that was not fair, equitable, transparent, competitive or cost-effective."

If, as Tlakula says, she is innocent of any wrongdoing then surely she should, in good conscience, step aside until her name has been cleared .

Not here, not in South Africa.

On the day the public protector comprehensively proved that a crime had been committed against the taxpayer on Zuma's watch, and that he had benefited from this crime, he gave a speech in which he did not see fit even to mention her findings.

You see, he is not at all ashamed. He appears not to care that he has been exposed, that the world is pointing at him and laughing at him - and at us. He has no shame. And without a sense of shame, an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, he will remain in office and continue as if nothing were wrong. In his warped view, the only thing that could lead to his removal from office would be a jail sentence.

Twenty years into our democracy we are sliding from high ideals into a free-for-all in which politicians are a law unto themselves and accountability is a word we use only in Power Point presentations.

In any democracy worth its salt, Tlakula would have, of her own volition, stepped down to protect the integrity and credibility of the institution she leads. Who, today, can believe that an institution led by a person found by two credible investigations to have acted as she did could run free, fair and independent elections?

Given the allegations about the elections held in Tlokwe, for example, do we want further tarnishing of the elections commission's name?

Even more incredible is that Tlakula's fellow commissioners at the IEC have not raised their hands and said: "Not in our name."

Their silence speaks volumes. Their inaction says they are comfortable with a situation in which one person brings down the house we have all built.

This is also what the ANC's highest decision-making body between conferences, its national executive committee, is saying about the party it leads. Not a single member of the committee is prepared to raise his hand and say to Zuma: "This far and no further." In the ANC NEC, the rot is now endemic.

It is, of course, easy to point fingers and accuse Zuma, his friends Dina Pule and Humphrey Mmemezi, and others, of all sorts of things. Truth is, they are not the guilty party here. We are.

South Africans deserve these leaders. We deserve a Zuma, because we have rewarded him for his scandals: Guptagate, Khwezigate, Malawigate, the Spy Tapes, Schabir Shaik .The list is long. The truly depressing part is that these "leaders" are busy subverting our institutions and turning them into paper tigers. By the time they leave office - for they shall - they will have done a huge amount of damage. They will have crippled the public protector's office and any other institution that is supposed to hold their like to account.

Smell the coffee, South Africa. Your country is being stolen.

- Timeslive

Who will save us from moral wasteland?

It is worrying that in the wake of the Nkandla report individuals with voices that carry ethical weight have chosen to remain mum, says Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.

Pretoria - One of the most glaring omissions in the light of Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s report on President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead has been the silence of voices that carry ethical and moral weight.

Virtually every piece of commentary has come from either political parties, the media or professional punditry.

Very little has come from what may be broadly referred to as the ethical and moral sector, such as faith communities and men and women of redoubtable personal integrity and stature beyond reproach.

There was a time when South Africa had plenty of such people.

The likes of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Dr Beyers Naude and Aggrey Klaaste were examples of individuals who did not need political office to say what was wrong in society and for their voices to carry weight.

The ANC itself was founded by men who were much more than political leaders in their communities.

These days such moral leadership is being entrusted to politicians.

It might be a throwback to the time when political leaders were understood to be men and women of integrity who carried themselves in accordance with that expectation.

It simply is not the case today.

In many instances, party politics have become dens of inequity where the extent of patronage is exchanged proportionally for the willingness to lie on behalf of the puppet master.

It is clear from this that those who seek to change society for the better might be making an egregious error in judgement if they assume political office is the best vehicle for pursuing a society with better morals.

One example after the other shows that politicians are straitjacketed by their sectarian interests.

Their comments on the moral and ethical failings of political leaders are always dismissed by their opponents as political point-scoring, rather than the desire to right wrongs.

It is not entirely the fault of politicians. They do what they naturally do. They became what they already are.

It is clear from this latest debacle that parliamentary politics have limitations.

It must now be clear that it is not necessary for all good patriots who have a vision of a different country to seek political office.

In many ways, party political office might hamstring those who want to speak truth to power.

The very person of President Jacob Zuma speaks to the folly of entrusting moral and ethical guidance to politicians.

How could we forget that it was the same Zuma who slept with the daughter of his friend – a young woman whom they both agreed during his rape trial shared the dynamic of a daughter to his father?

Civil society must not allow this moral crisis to continue.

There must surely be men and women in our communities whose stature is beyond reproach and who can be trusted to provide moral leadership.

I might not know who they are, but there must be a local equivalent of the international flavoured “Elders” created by Nelson Mandela.

The idea of the Elders was simple and universal enough.

Entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel agreed that communities in various parts of the world looked up to elders for guidance, dispute resolution and moral leadership and thought why not have a global group of elders who did this for all countries.

They took their idea to Madiba and in 2007, the group was launched.

Admittedly, the Elders are mainly individuals who have at various points in their lives held political office, but the key ingredient in choosing them was their impeccable moral and ethical integrity, and a demonstrated activism for greater social good that transcends political ideologies.

South Africa needs such a group.

It needs men and women who can help divert our country from the moral dumpsite to which it is headed.

The often cited “good people” in the ANC able to steer the party that once upon a time occupied the moral high ground in our society have not materialised.

If they exist, their silence in the never-ending drama of shameless affairs by cadres of the party means they have chosen the ANC over their country.

Having dispensed with the moral compass in their own party, they cannot be trusted to be the rudder our society desperately needs.

We have enough analysts, columnists and other pundits.

Many of them are adept at describing the problem.

But through no fault of their own, do not have the gravitas to ensure their words count for something politicians feel the need to worry about.

However, there is value in analysis of society and punditry.

But we need words of vision and hope more.

Our degenerative state of affairs requires that this be as good a time as any to give way for the words of modern-day prophets who might just intervene where it really matters and where our politicians have failed us time after time.

* Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is executive editor of the Pretoria News

- Pretoria News

Nkandla worse than Watergate

Nkandlagate is about personal greed and moral shamelessness, says Allister Sparks.

Cape Town - This is worse than Watergate; worse even than the Muldergate scandal of the apartheid era, which led to the demise of Information Minister Connie Mulder and eventually Prime Minister John Vorster.

Those were global landmarks of political notoriety. But now they have been surpassed by President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandlagate. It is more outrageous and despicable by far.

I say this because Watergate and Muldergate were about political skulduggery. President Richard Nixon condoned the burglary at Washington’s Watergate Hotel to get his hands on his political opponent’s campaign plans ahead of an election. Mulder and his cohorts misused taxpayers’ money trying to buy journalists and whole newspapers to “tell the good story” of apartheid South Africa.

They cheated and lied for political reasons.

Nkandlagate is about personal greed and moral shamelessness. It is about looting public money so that one man and his family can live in extravagant opulence for the rest of their lives – amid some of his people’s most abject poverty.

As Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s report reveals, Zuma’s grandiose estate, set in R10 million worth of landscape gardening covering the size of eight-and-a-half soccer pitches, is in an area populated by 114 416 of some of the country’s poorest people.

Forty percent of them are unemployed. Only 10 000 households have electricity, 7 000 have no access to piped water and 12 000 are still using pit latrines.

Where are those zealous young ANC poo-throwers now?

Worst of all, though, is the fact that the ANC, its national executive committee and its cabinet, are going to stand by this flawed leader. At least Nixon had the decency to resign over Watergate, as did Mulder and eventually Vorster.

That is what Zuma should do if he wants to save any honour for himself, his party and his country.

It would, of course, be a tough call for any ruling party to dump its leader just six weeks before a national election. But they could do so soon after May 7.

I hope so, because to cling to Zuma for another five years would be disastrous for the ANC. Nkandla isn’t going to go away, just as the arms deal scandal hasn’t. Nor will the Guptagate affair. Zuma is tainted beyond redemption and if the ANC leadership decides to rally around him come hell or high water, all its ministers and other senior officials will have to keep obfuscating, lying and deceiving the public for the next five years, by which time they will themselves all be morally corrupted. Which would mean the disintegration of the party.

And let me say this. Critical though I have been of the Zuma ANC these past few years, it is obviously still the party of the majority of our people, so that its precipitous disintegration would be disastrous for the country.

I believe the ANC is on its way out, because it is strife-torn, has grown tired and is bereft of fresh ideas. But it will be a gradual, incremental decline which will ensure stability through the transition.

A sudden disintegration could lead to chaos. I hope Zuma realises that and acts as he should.

Meanwhile, there is the question of whether Zuma lied to Parliament, which is an impeachable offence, when he told the National Assembly that he and his family had built their own Nkandla homes and that the state had not built any or benefited them. As Madonsela has found, this was not true.

But she declined to make a finding on the question of lying because, she says, Zuma claims he was thinking only about the houses, not the array of other structures that had been added at state expense, such as a visitors’ centre, a cattle kraal, chicken run, swimming pool, an amphitheatre and a string of other expensive amenities.

It may, she says, have been “a bona fide mistake”.

After a close reading of Madonsela’s lengthy and meticulously detailed report, I think that was a generous decision.

The core fault in the Nkandla affair is that it was undertaken as a “cost-shared project”. Before he became president, Zuma decided to upgrade his private home in rural KwaZulu-Natal, which at the time consisted of a few rondavels surrounded by a ramshackle fence. He took out a bond, engaged an architect and a quantity surveyor, and work began on building three new homes the architect designed for him.

After becoming president, standing rules required that this property be provided with prescribed security facilities.

The work had to be supervised by the police and defence forces and paid for by the state. But at Zuma’s insistence his private architect, Minenhle Makhanya, was appointed architect and principal agent for the whole project, in other words the on-the-ground boss of the whole enterprise – without the job having been put out to tender, as required, and without a thought being given to the obvious conflict of interests that might be involved.

Here was the president’s private architect in control of a project in which costs had to be shared between Zuma as his primary employer and the state. With everyone else involved eager to please Number One, the door was obviously wide open for costs to be slipped from one account to the other.

Thus a “safe haven” for the president required by the regulations, which could have been built inside the main house for R500 000, ballooned into an elaborate underground bunker accessible by special lifts from all three of the houses with a secret exit at a total cost R14 million.

Similar escalations happened across the board resulting, in Madonsela’s words, “in substantial value being unduly added to the president’s private property”. Even allowing for the bona fide mistake, can anyone believe Zuma was unaware of this?

That is how the costs of a project initially estimated at R27m swelled to R246m. That is a tenfold, or 1 000 percent, overrun. Madonsela has described it as “unconscionable”. Yet nobody directly involved in the project asked any questions.

Madonsela has excoriated them, including some ministers and whole organs of state, saying they “failed dismally” and finds some guilty of unlawful and improper conduct and maladministration.

But what about the president? He was Number One in this project, officially referred to as “The Principal”. He received many reports, was kept informed by his architect, paid several visits to the work site, even sometimes issued instructions about changes he wanted made.

It is inconceivable that he never noticed the whole project was going over the top to such an extravagant and highly visible degree.

Madonsela seems to think so too. She says there is no evidence he ever asked about costs.

“It is my considered view,” she adds, “that he tacitly accepted the implementation of all measures at his residence and has unduly benefited from the enormous capital investment from the non-security installations at his private residence.”

This failure to act was a serious breach of the Executive Ethics Code and amounted to “conduct that is inconsistent with his office as a member of the cabinet”.

Quite clearly Zuma didn’t want to know. In his world there is a notice on his desk saying: “The buck bypasses here?”

* Allister Sparks is a veteran journalist and political commentator.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.

- Cape Times

JZ guilty of the worst political sin

It’s clear now that the president did in fact lie to Parliament about Nkandla, says Max du Preez.

I put it to you, Mr President, you did lie to Parliament. Telling a fib or two while electioneering or through one’s spin-doctor is one thing.

Standing up –more than once – in the highest policy-making body in the land, the chamber where those people we citizens elected to be our voice meet, and telling untruths is close to the worst political sin.

In 1979, State President John Vorster had to resign in disgrace after he was found to have lied to Parliament about not knowing about the taxpayers’ money the Department of Information spent. Even the ruling party and the government during apartheid regarded this as a mortal sin.

Public Protector Thuli Madonsela found that Jacob Zuma had not “wilfully” lied to Parliament. She blinked or perhaps she decided to add that so that the ANC and government were not pushed over the edge in their reaction to her report. From the rest of her report, she makes it abundantly clear that she thought he had lied to Parliament.

Zuma told Parliament he and his family built the homestead at Nkandla with no contribution from taxpayers and that he had nothing to do with or any knowledge of the “security upgrades”.

We know now that Zuma flies to Nkandla most weekends and did so when the “upgrades” were in progress. We know that his personal architect was in charge of the building and the upgrades at Nkandla.

We know that at different stages he complained or gave advice on the speed and nature of the “upgrades”.

We know now, as he knew all along, that the “firepool” wasn’t just a water reservoir, but a luxurious swimming pool. Any other citizen who has a swimming pool regards it as part of his home and property.

We know now, as Zuma knew all along, that other parts of the “security upgrades” had nothing to do with security, but simply added to the value of the Nkandla mansion.

You decide: Did Jacob Zuma not wilfully lie when he swore to Parliament that he did not know the details nor the benefit of taxpayers’ money spent on Nkandla?

The first thing the ANC latched on to when it responded to the Nkandla report was that it had found Zuma did not lie to Parliament. It was the one phrase it needed to deflect pressure for the party to sanction its leader.

But the men and women at Luthuli House know as well as I do that Zuma is now officially in the same class of African leaders as Mobutu sese Seko, Felix Houphouët-Boigny and Robert Mugabe.

The ANC’s chairman in North West, Supra Mahumapelo, spoke for many when he said at the weekend: “They say Zuma is our president. We see him as our king. In the African tradition, a king must always be respected and embraced by everybody, regardless.”

That, fellow citizens, is exactly what the post-Polokwane leadership of the ANC has done to the liberation movement, to the 102-year-old party of Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela.

Power, privilege and sectional interest are regarded as more valuable than the Freedom Charter, the 1994 settlement and the 1996 constitution.

No wonder there are more millionaires with the surname Zuma today than with any other surname anywhere in Africa. That is what a king’s family is entitled to.

The ANC leadership and that of the Communist Party, the ANC Youth League, the ANC Women’s League, the MK Military Veterans Association and the Congress of South African Students are happy with that. They reserved their fury and insults for the brave public protector.

When the Nkandla Report was made public, I tweeted that a free media had exposed the scandal and an institution of the state had confirmed it and nailed the head of state.

Failed state, my foot. Most people who reacted said it would depend on what action would be taken.

We know nothing is going to happen. But I’ll still bet my bottom dollar that Zuma will not serve his full second term; that the ANC will have to get rid of him well before the 2019 election.

Civil society should push hard for the more than 700 criminal charges against him to be reinstated, because we know, without a doubt, that the decision to drop them was political and not legal.

Much of the evidence had been accepted by the high court already, in the case against Schabir Shaik, so the prospects of a jail sentence are real.

It is time to play hardball with the man that is disgracing us as a nation.

* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Newspapers.

- Pretoria News

Putting a spin on Nkandla

As the dust from Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s 447-page report into the expenditure on President Jacob Zuma’s private homestead in Nkandla refuses to settle and calls for his impeachment grow louder, Lee Rondganger compares some of the government’s spin before the report’s release, to what it actually found.

Renovations to President Zuma’s private residence in Nkandla were first highlighted by newspapers in 2009. It was estimated at the time that renovations to his estate would cost R65 million.

Then that estimate swelled to R206m. Now it is R246m.

Along the way, a few members of Zuma’s cabinet, and the national police commissioner, rallied around the embattled president and sought to justify the expenditure. They still differ with the public protector’s finding that some of the improvements had no security use at all.

* In his address to Parliament in November 2012 after the Nkandla scandal broke, President Jacob Zuma said his family had built its own houses and no public funds were used on any homes on the homestead.

He said he and his family paid for the construction, and that he was still paying off a mortgage bond.

Zuma said the only money spent by the government on his home was for security features, including fencing, bullet-proof windows and a bunker.

“I was advised that the security upgrades were... necessary in terms of the National Key Points Act,” he said.

Madonsela found:

“This was not true,” Madonsela found.

However, she said: “I have accepted the evidence that he addressed Parliament in good faith and was not thinking about the Visitors’ Centre but his family dwellings when he made the statement.”

* Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi, whose department was responsible for the Nkandla upgrade, met the media on Sunday January 26, 2013, with the findings of an internal task team that investigated the expenditure in Nkandla.

Nxesi – with Justice Minister Jeff Radebe and State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele – insisted Zuma had not been aware of the cost or details of the work.

“Was the president involved?” asked Radebe.

“The answer is no. No money of the state was used for the upgrade of the private residence of the president. There were irregularities, in this instance the manner in which officials in the Department of Public Works procured these services, and all those implicated officials, the law enforcement agencies are going to take their course to find those people involved in order to be accountable for that,” Radebe said.

Madonsela found:

“Regarding President Zuma’s conduct in respect of the use of state funds in the Nkandla project, on the only evidence currently available, the President failed to apply his mind to the contents of the declaration of his private residence as a National Key Point and specifically failed to implement security measures at own cost as directed by it. It is my considered view that the President, as the head of South Africa Incorporated, was wearing two hats, that of the ultimate guardian of the resources of the people of South Africa and that of being a beneficiary of public privileges of some of the guardians of public power and state resources, but failed to discharge his responsibilities in terms of the latter. I believe the President should have ideally asked questions regarding the scale, cost and affordability of the Nkandla project”.

* Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa, at the same press conference, said the reason for the security upgrade was that of the security threat assessment for any project for any public officer, whether it was a minister or president.

“At the point of the assessment, the conclusion then becomes that these are the kind of things you need and that has to be achieved. Now, whether that would be justifiable or not, I would say, yes. In this case, threat assessment was such that all the things which have been pointed out here were said to be needed in that process.”

Madonsela found:

“The implementation of the security measures failed to comply with the parameters set out in the laws in question for the proper exercise of such authority. The key violation in this regard is the failure to follow the processes outlined in the cabinet policy and the deviation from the 16 security measures that were recommended in the Second Security Evaluation by the SAPS. This constitutes improper conduct and maladministration. With the National Key Points Act having been inexplicably dragged in halfway through the implementation of the Nkandla Project, its provisions had to be complied with. This did not happen. Neither was there compliance with the contents of the declaration of the Nkandla residence as a National Key Point, as signed by the Minister of Police on 08 April, 2010.”

* ANC spokesman, Jackson Mthembu, responding to the government cluster press conference said the report “vindicates the president and our belief in the (his) innocence on what he consistently said were lies and that he personally built his residence and that the government only built security features that are prescribed”.

Madonsela found:

That the Department of Public Works had implemented a number of the measures, including buildings and other items constructed and installed by the department that went beyond what was reasonably required for his security.

“Measures that should never have been implemented as they are neither provided for in the regulatory instruments… include the construction inside the President’s residence of a Visitors’ Centre; an expensive cattle kraal with a culvert and chicken run; a swimming pool; an amphitheatre; marquee area; some of the extensive paving; and the relocation of neighbours who used to form part of the original homestead, at an enormous cost to the state.

“Measures that are not expressly provided for, but could have been discretionally implemented in a manner that benefits the broader community, include helipads and a private clinic.

“The failure to explore more economic and community-inclusive options to accommodate the discretional security-related needs constitutes improper conduct and maladministration”.

* On December 19, 2013, Ministers of the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster (JCPS) and Minister of Public Works, Thulas Nxesi, released the Task Team Report – that was originally classified – on matters relating to the security upgrade at President Jacob Zuma’s private residence in Nkandla.

National police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, explained that in rural areas people had “no fire extinguishers or fire brigades”.

She said the “best we know is to take a bucket, dip it in water and throw it on the fire”.

It was, she said, not a swimming pool but a fire pool.

Lieutenant-General Vijay Ramlakan, the retired surgeon-general who represented the defence force, confirmed that there was “what is referred to in the media” as a swimming pool, but that the department of defence’s original request had been “translated by public works engineers into what is there”.

The chicken run was created to replace a number of “building block” structures which were obstructions and “potential hiding areas for intruders”, said Nxesi.

“The relocation of these loose structures to a dedicated area improved the security on site,” said Nxesi.

The cattle kraal and culvert were important for security the task team found.

False alarms as well as damage to the fence and sensitive electronic equipment could be caused by the cattle.

“The cattle and people were using the same entrance due to the location of the kraal posing a potential risk in the high security area,” said Nxesi.

Regarding the air conditioning, Ramlakan said: “Anybody who has had to be (in a room) with bulletproof windows will know those windows cannot be easily opened”.

It was for this reason, he said, that air conditioning was necessary.

Madonsela found:

There was no fire pool but a “swimming pool”, she said adding that President Jacob Zuma improperly benefited from measures implemented in the name of security, but which included “non-security comforts” like the Visitors’ Centre, swimming pool, cattle kraal and culvert, chicken run and amphitheatre as well as the brick-and-mortar clinic on the homestead’s doorstep.

The Zuma family benefited from the “substantial value being unduly added” to the president’s private property, she said.

Costs of the non-security installation (those not identified by the two state security assessment) should be born by Zuma and his family, including for the Visitors’ Centre, swimming pool, cattle kraal and culvert, chicken run and amphitheatre.

In August last year, Zuma indicated he would pay for the cattle kraal as he had asked for a larger one to be built.

- Daily News

Zuma’s legacy: a rotten ANC

Zuma’s name will go down in history as the name of the moment when it became clear that the ANC was rotten, says Richard Pithouse.

Jacob Zuma will not be redeemed by a “Lula moment” or “second transition”. His name will go down in history with Marikana and Nkandla.

Different people will call the precise moment at which the conflation of the idea of the ANC with the altogether more tawdry realities of the existing ANC became both irrational and immoral differently.

For some people the tipping point was the SACP’s embrace of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. For others it was the repression of the mutiny in uMkhonto we Sizwe in Angola in 1984. The demobilisation of popular forces in the 1990s was a turning point for some people. The decision to voluntarily implement a structural adjustment programme in 1996 was the final straw for some.

There was a large group of people for whom the election of Jacob Zuma to the Presidency of the party in 2007 – on the back of a thuggish campaign, despite clear evidence of corruption and Zuma’s atrocious behaviour during his rape trial – made it impossible to continue to see the party as an emancipatory project.

There are people for whom Zuma’s inaction during the xenophobic pogroms in 2008, and the failure to hold anyone to account for the pogrom, marked the end of the dream.

The brazen attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban in 2009, openly backed by the state and the ruling party, was the point of no return for others.

The televised murder of Andries Tatane marked the end of a dream for some people. The relentless accumulation of corruption scandals around Zuma, his family and other figures in the party, have also corroded the ANC’s standing.

But it has been Marikana and Nkandla that have done the most damage to Zuma and the ANC.

The fact that Zuma has presided over a massacre of striking workers – a massacre for which no one has been held accountable – while building a palace for himself with public funds, makes any attempt to defend him or his party simply and entirely scurrilous.

With a licence to kill and a licence to loot the ANC has become a predatory excrescence on society.

Elite nationalism tends to conflate the interests of the people as a whole with the interests of elites. It remains a powerful force in our society for many reasons, one of which is that for as long as wealth and power remain concentrated in white hands, there is a progressive aspect to the accumulation of black wealth and power.

But elite nationalism also functions to reproduce and to legitimate exploitation, exclusion and repression.

Marikana and Nkandla both, in very different ways, mark a major breakdown in the ability of elite nationalism to claim that it is in the interests of the people as a whole.

Marikana marks the moment at which it became untenable to continue to pretend that workers’ interests should be subordinate to those of elites claiming to represent the nation as a whole.

Marikana was never about the worker in isolation. It was always about the worker in community, both on the mines and in the countryside. But because the worker, as a political figure, is so often imagined in masculine terms, this was often elided.

One reason for this is that much of the theory woven into the standard visions of redemptive alternatives to capitalism places the worker, often implicitly assumed to be male, at the heart of both the struggle for a new order and the new order itself. This kind of theory, common in some conceptions of socialism, is useful for drawing a political distinction between those who produce wealth and those who appropriate it. But just as some forms of nationalism function to exclude people who are not part of the elite, some forms of socialism reduce the people to the workers and function to exclude both people who are not workers in the formal sense, as well as sites of struggle outside of the workplace, from the political imagination.

We have a long history of the community and the home becoming sites of crucial political import. The struggle to build and sustain a home was central to many mobilisations over the last century, including moments like the popular power built by the Industrial & Commercial Workers’ Union in Durban in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the squatters movements around Johannesburg in the 1940s, the struggles against eviction in the late 1950s and the struggles in the shack lands around the major cities in the 1980s, perhaps most famously in Crossroads in Cape Town.

And given the way in which the regulation of space was central to apartheid, the act of building and sustaining a home often had, even when it has not connected to overly political forms of mobilisation, deeply political consequences. Cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing and raising children all become practices with real political weight.

This is not unique to our experience. US author and social activist bell hooks writes that in the US: “historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a home-place, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical dimension, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely construct the issue of humanzation (sic), where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.”

In post-apartheid South Africa the community and the home are often still sites of real political intensity. The courage and tenacity with which people rebuild their shacks again and again after violent evictions and, in Durban, state-backed murder, is astonishing.

This sphere of politics is not taken seriously. The standard theories for imagining better societies, and strategies for getting there, are often not well equipped to make sense of it. When this sphere of politics does show up in the elite public sphere it is often silenced by being automatically presented as a ‘service delivery protest’ or presented, sometimes in plainly racist terms, as an irrational and threatening eruption of violence and criminality.

But the contrast between the palace that Zuma has built for himself and his family with public money, some of it taken directly from budgets allocated for public housing, and the tenacity and courage of people, many of them women, who strive to build and sustain homes for themselves and their families in the face of a brutal and contemptuous state, is instructive. If we examine Nkandla together with the land occupations named after Marikana in Durban and Cape Town, both of which have been subject to unlawful state violence, it becomes clear that the state and capital are both sites of appropriation and repression, that the workplace and the community are both sites of struggle, and that the wage and the home both remain subject to intense contestation.

As the ANC limps into its decline, sustained by the idea of what it has meant to people rather than its tawdry reality, and buttressed with patronage and repression, there are no credible electoral alternatives.

The DA, together with Cope and AgangSA, offer nothing other than the promise of a less corrupt version of the economic arrangements that continue to condemn millions of people to permanent destitution. None of these parties are willing to allocate land, in rural and urban areas, on the basis of social need rather than private profit – or to put an end to evictions and forced removals.

The EFF claims to subordinate capital to the state. It also tells some of the truth about how, 20 years after apartheid, our society continues to be predicated on highly racialised forms of exploitation and exclusion. But with its deeply compromised leaders – at national and provincial levels – its active attempts to generate a personality cult, its militarism, its masculinism, its crudity, its evident complicity with xenophobia and its profoundly authoritarian conception of the political is what Antonio Gramsci called a “morbid symptom” of our crisis rather than a credible response to it.

Although WASP gets a fair bit of media coverage, often as a result of having a young white woman as a prominent member, the fact is that it, along with parties like Azapo and the PAC, is simply irrelevant to our national drama.

Zuma’s name will go down in history as the name of the moment when it became clear to anyone willing to confront reality directly that the ANC was rotten. But it is a lot less clear whether or not we will be able to build a democratic politics, rooted in the workplace and the community, as well as universities, prisons and sporting and religious organisations, that can affirm the equal humanity of everyone and is organised and sustained at sufficient scale to bring the state and capital to heel.

* Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This article also appears on the website of the South African Civil Society Information Service (sacsis.org.za).

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.

- The Star

Nkandla: The racist compound

On Friday, the Mail & Guardian will publish "Nkandla: The Great Unravelling" as an e-book. In this excerpt: how an ordinary word was turned racist.

COMPOUND: (noun)

• an open area enclosed by a fence, for example around a factory or large house or within a prison
• (South African) area containing single-sex living quarters for migrant workers, especially miners.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time, in the heat of battle, as it were. "She's called the president's house a 'compound', a word used for hostels and migrant workers," said presidential spokesperson and firebrand Mac Maharaj during what amounted to a live debate with Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille. "She'd never use that for a white person's home."

It was an absurdity he would come to regret.

Why Maharaj decided to go on air on Talk Radio 702 alongside Zille in early November 2012 is in and of itself an interesting question. In the years before, and in the time since, Maharaj, the presidency and the government as a whole had been largely unavailable for questions, never mind debate. Government departments refused to provide information, politicians dodged questions, and President Jacob Zuma ignored the issue altogether.

But by the last quarter of 2012, the strategy of ignoring the issue was wearing thin. It was time to fight back – not with facts and figures, but with emotion.

On November 5 2012, Maharaj took to the airwaves to decry Zille and her party as racist. Ten days later, Zuma expressed much the same sentiment (though far more obliquely) during a memorable question session in Parliament when the president spoke, in a tone alternating between outrage and disappointment, about how aggrieved he felt, and how he took exception to some of the questions being asked about Nkandla.

"People are speaking without knowing, saying I have spent so much of the government's money. I have never done so," railed Zuma. "It is unfair, but I do not want to use harsher words, because you believe that people like me cannot build a home."

It was a new spin on an old approach. Over the years various government departments, the ANC, and the presidency itself, had some success – mixed though it was – with the shoot-the-messenger approach: Nkandla was a creation of a tjatjarag (overeager) media.

Coverage of Nkandla was born into antagonism, three years before racism came into it directly, and the approach rarely wavered, although the details changed from instance to instance. The media were out to get Zuma, embarrass him, weaken the ANC, support the political opposition, were disrespectful of traditional values, urban-centric, lying, misrepresenting, misunderstanding, breaking various laws, and generally acting in a fashion unbecoming.

As evidence mounted, some of the specific accusations fell away, but the underlying theme continued in statements to Parliament, in media statements, and in speeches: on Nkandla, the media were being unfair.

Now, however, the media and the opposition were being racist, or – should one strain to interpret Zuma's words as not dealing with race – dismissive of a man from a rural backwater without much in the way of formal education.

In hindsight, it was an approach doomed to failure.

Three years into the story, Zuma's primary defence was still ignorance, and that was starting to look mighty disingenuous. In his parliamentary answer, Zuma again said he did not know how much various aspects of the Nkandla project had cost, that he simply did not know where the money had gone, just shy of three years after the first questions had been raised.

As an academic paper on the coverage of Nkandla would put it in early 2014, to maintain such ignorance "over the time span of the coverage is scarcely becoming but also unconvincing. Why, it must be asked, did [Zuma] not address his ignorance in order to make a public statement consistent with the responsibilities of his office?"

Bringing race into the mix would, in and of itself, also be neither becoming nor convincing. Adding race on top of ignorance just compounded the mistrust.

Timing and context aside, choosing "compound" as the exemplar of racist motivation was also ill-advised, as Maharaj would soon discover.

Had it remained just a passing comment, made off the cuff in a medium that is more transient than most, the "compound' debacle would not have been all that embarrassing to Maharaj and Zuma. Then the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) came to the party.

"You are hereby notified that, with immediate effect, President Zuma's Nkandla home should be referred to as the President's, or Mr Zuma's, 'Nkandla residence', and not a 'compound' or 'homestead' or any other such term," read a memo issued to staff by SABC head of news Jimi Matthews, shortly after Maharaj decried the term, and leaked almost immediately. "Please also refrain from using imported terminology in reporting on the controversy surrounding the infrastructural developments around the residence, such as 'Nkandlagate', 'Zumaville' and such like."

On "Nkandlagate", Matthews had a point. In analysis and interpretive journalism it is great, and entirely justified shorthand, but for a news organisation that has old-school ideas about objectivity it could be troublesome. But on "compound" and "homestead", it looked as though the SABC was taking marching orders from the presidency, letting Maharaj police its language. With political influence invariably suspected, and over the years occasionally plainly observed at the SABC, the combination was unfortunate.

The SABC, like just about every news outfit that ever touched the issue, had used "compound" in many instances for many years before November 2012 to refer to Nkandla. So, a quick review of government documents showed, had the government itself. The department of rural development and land reform had not shied away from using the term when speaking about clusters of dwellings, the department of public works had happily referred to the "security compound" that forms part of Nkandla, the term had been used in Parliament to refer to Nkandla, as well as to high-end gated communities, and so on and so forth.

If Maharaj had expected sympathy from the public, or self-censorship from the media, he must have been greatly disappointed. In comments online, letters to editors, in calls to radio stations and idle conversation far and wide, there was either outrage at what was seen as a cynical ploy to divert the Nkandla debate, at the SABC's pliant attitude, or just general mirth at such a ham-fisted bit of spin.

And a few months later, even the ANC started quietly reintroducing the phrase "Nkandla compound" in its daily roundup of news, as the communications strategy shifted from ignorance and victimhood to innocence – an approach that would not be without its bumps and false starts either.

This is an edited excerpt from Nkandla: The Great Unravelling, a Mail & Guardian long-form ­journalism project to be published as an e-book on Kindle and other major platforms on March 28.

- M&G

Zuma could owe R16,8 Mill tax for Nkandla 'fringe benefits'

President Jacob Zuma could owe the taxman R16.8 million for the fringe benefits he derived from so-called security upgrades to his private Nkandla homestead in KwaZulu-Natal, the DA said on Wednesday.

“The DA believes that President Zuma could have a tax liability of around R16.8m for the fringe benefits we calculate he received from the R246m of public money spent on his private home in Nkandla,” Democratic Alliance MP Tim Harris said.

The “damning” report released last week by Public Protector Thuli Madonsela highlighted how Zuma had materially and improperly benefited from the upgrades, and in doing so violated the executives ethics code.

Madonsela had made clear that items such as the cattle kraal, the chicken run, the “fire pool”, the visitors’ centre, and the amphitheatre built at Nkandla had nothing to do with security considerations for the president, but only served to benefit his personal property.

Harris said that while Madonsela had not explicitly stated how much Zuma owed for all the non-security items included in the upgrade, the DA had calculated, on a conservative estimate, that these could have been worth around R52.8m.

The DA had accordingly written to Zuma requesting him to “table his re-payment plan for the amount he owes with Parliament so that it can be subjected to public scrutiny”.

If the amounts were not repaid, then they could be regarded as fringe benefits, which Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan had recently confirmed all South Africans, including the president, were liable to pay tax on.

Harris said that according to the Income Tax Act, Zuma would owe tax on benefits or advantages derived by reason of employment or the holding of any office.

Determining his tax liability involved adding the value of the benefit to his annual salary of R2.6m.

“According to the DA’s conservative estimates, a total private benefit of R52.8m has accrued from the project — way beyond the R10.6m the department of public works appears to have allocated to the president’s ‘private account’.

“We believe the president should repay the full amount spent for his private benefit, but even if he only pays the R10.6m specified by public works, the excess — as a fringe benefit — would trigger a liability of R16.8m in tax payable,” Harris said.

- Citizen