Leadership in question

Dispatch Editorial:By all accounts, President Jacob Zuma is a thoroughly likeable fellow who, we all know, wears his heart on his sleeve. But how effective are his governing abilities? The question came to the fore again this week after two contrasting incidents that together have a somewhat ironical twist.

Firstly, the President visited informal settlements around Johannesburg. He empathised with residents and confessed to almost being reduced to tears. Any

attempt to explain why people were still living “like pigs” when the country was nearly celebrating 20 years of freedom would be meaningless, he said.

For initiative, empathy and candour, he deserves 10 out of 10. But what is puzzling is why the conditions took him by surprise. Surely he knows that much of the population is in survival mode. Shacks straddle the length and breadth of the country. Desperate poverty is on each street corner.

This is why, for Zuma’s information, government corruption and sloth is so despicable and why so many citizens gag or yelp when his Cabinet ministers spend R1million-plus on new cars or live it up in five-star hotels, or when billions are blown by State officials on dodgy tenders.

Having almost wept over squalor and the lack of services in the squatter settlement, one can only wonder what the President made of another incident relating to living conditions – albeit at the other end of the lifestyle scale.

It emerged yesterday that one of his wives, Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, had been without water or lights for a week in the eight-bedroom Durban mansion where she has lived for five years. This was because neither she, nor the President or their benefactors, had paid the eThekwini

municipality’s electricity bill, reportedly totalling R9 564.87.

Now, one does not expect the President to personally run around paying electricity bills, but surely the official support structures around him are aware of the importance of the first lady meeting such elementary responsibilities. And if they were not, then the President or one of his aides should surely have warned them – especially since the first lady has a reputation for defaulting and has been disconnected once before.

So what, one can only ask, does the entire spousal support office in the Presidency actually do? They have a budget that doubled to R15 million after Zuma took power. His wives get support staff, computer equipment, and even a State-funded researcher each to assist them. Yet the first lady is embarrassingly without water or lights.

A perennial problem for Zuma seems to be managing his personal affairs. The snag when one is seen as being unable to do this, is that it raises an unavoidable question: If you can’t run your own household how on earth can you manage a country?