Say what you like about Jacob Zuma walking out on the state capture commission, but I think it takes real self-control to be told by deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, on live television, that he’s just not that into you and not run blindly out of the building ugly-crying into your lawyer’s hanky.
Yes, it looked a bit absurd when he fled on Thursday, leaving his lawyers to huff and puff about how unfairly he was being treated. It is, after all, very difficult to look like a genuine victim when you’ve hired a person to do a job and then get all pearl-clutchy when that person does the job you hired them to do.
Still, I think the former president and Oakbay Investments’ Employee of the Year from 2008 to 2016 did pretty well in trying circumstances.
Certainly, his heartbreaking final plea to Zondo on Wednesday — “I dispute that we were never friends” — had a real dignity to it, even though it was pretty much the closing argument of every stalker ever, just before you get a restraining order or move to a new town.
Then again, perhaps he didn’t want to say much more, given how threadbare his strategy was already looking.
Now, I’m not a lawyer, but if Zuma genuinely believes Zondo and he are pals, and that Zondo is therefore compromised because he has a personal relationship with Zuma, then why did Zuma appoint him in the first place, unless it was to try to plant a legal landmine he could blow up later when things started going pear-shaped for him?
It’s very possible that senior ANC officials have a much more utilitarian relationship with friendship, seeing it more as a rhetorical device than something you actually feel or do.
To be fair to Zuma, it is possible he truly believed he and Zondo were friends, at least according to the ANC’s definition of friendship.
On Tuesday, for example, President Cyril Ramaphosa reminded us that ANC friendship is a very broad church indeed. Replying to tweeted birthday wishes from Zimbabwean strongman Emmerson Mnangagwa, Ramaphosa described Mnangagwa, a man who oversaw the murder of tens of thousands of civilians in the 1980s, crushed Zimbabwe’s free press and whose party has all but wrecked the country’s economy, as “my president and friend”.
I don’t want to dictate the terms of Ramaphosa’s relationships or tell him who he can and can’t be friends with, but I hope he understands that it is literally impossible to be friends with someone such as Mnangagwa, since friendship requires, at the very least, recognition of a soul.
In other words, it’s very possible that senior ANC officials have a much more utilitarian relationship with friendship, seeing it more as a rhetorical device than something you actually feel or do. Service delivery, growing the economy, having friends: these are all abstractions; pleasant to talk about and imagine, but because they are merely concepts, not something you ever have to try to do.
Perhaps, in the end, that’s why Zuma looked so stoic after Zondo told him: “It’s not me, it’s you.” Because it didn’t hurt. Because they’re not friends and never were. And if Zuma disputes that, well, he can go tell it to a judge.
