The nation wants to know the state of its president

08 February 2017 - 09:08 By The Times Editorial
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President Jacob Zuma will deliver his State of the Nation address tomorrow. It is an understatement to say that expectations are low.

Zuma's speeches are traditionally bland, peppered with "nine-point plans" and scarcely believable claims of success - and delivered in a halting oratorical style, suggesting he is not entirely confident in what he is saying.

But we may be in for a more direct and, therefore, less ignorable speech this time around. With 10 months to go as ANC president, this is probably the last address he will deliver as a man fully in charge of his party and the country.

Zuma has begun to construct a narrative to explain his brushes with the business establishment and the constitutional order. He let slip, in an address to the ANC Youth League in his home province KwaZulu-Natal in December, that he is the victim of a strategy by "white monopoly capital" to prevent radical transformation.

The narrative is that he has been courageously attempting to transform South Africa, but has been prevented from doing so by powerful forces acting for the capitalist establishment. This group is so powerful and influential that it never makes its views known under its own name. Instead, it cuts BEE deals and talks earnestly about economic empowerment to disguise its true motive: the protection of the interests of an elite few who were born in the maw of the apartheid state and who secretly wish for its return.

Once such a narrative establishes that there are hidden forces behind everything, the next step is not difficult to take. This hidden enemy is so sophisticated that it may take the guise of an ANC stalwart or even a minister such as Pravin Gordhan, whom Zuma himself was hypnotised into appointing.

The well-disguised enemy is everywhere: in newspaper articles, in public protector reports, in opposition parties.why, even in the heart of government.

It would be refreshing if Zuma were to share this vision with the nation rather than only with obscure meetings of the ANC Youth League. Perhaps he will finally spell out the plan for "radical economic transformation" which he has been "duped" into not implementing. The president might not be well acquainted with the state of the nation, but at least, for once, the nation would know the true state of its president.

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