TOM EATON | We all know Zuma’s a bad investment, so how’s he going to pay his debts?

This week’s court ruling ordering Jacob Zuma to pay back R7.8m to VBS Mutual Bank raises two obvious questions: how is Giggles of Stalingrad planning to scrape together that kind of cash, and will it involve orphaning Carl Niehaus a third time?

To many embittered South Africans, those seem like silly questions with the same, obvious answer. Zuma, they imagine, must be loaded, given the feeding frenzy that happened on his watch. His home at Nkandla might be safe from repossession, but it seems impossible that he didn’t also pick up the odd penthouse in Cape Town or heap of Krugerrands back when the state capture report was only a twinkle in Thuli Madonsela’s eye.

This, however, is Jacob Zuma we’re taking about, a man whose relationship with money is like a toddler’s relationship with chocolate: he clearly likes it, but he needs someone else to get it for him and has no idea where it comes from or how it’s made.

Indeed, one of the more abject things to come out of the trial of Schabir Shaik was the revelation that Zuma, far from being a Machiavellian financial whizz, was an adult who needed to be given an allowance.

I genuinely believe that Niehaus would give Zuma everything he owns, including the plastic Pick n Pay packet in which it all fits.

All of which is why I think we should be open to the possibility that Zuma, like so many hustlers and flimflam artists, is perpetually broke and lives almost entirely on the charity of others.

Of course, when those charitable others were Shaik or the Guptas or any number of corporate sleazeballs hoping to get a toe in the door of the Treasury, it was a pretty good strategy. Someone like Zuma didn’t even need to accept gifts of cash to get by: when you’re a powerful man surrounded by criminals on the make, you and your family never have to pay for anything.

Those days, however, are long gone. Today, Zuma is a supremely terrible investment, offering hustlers a dismal rate of return. Sure, he can probably still introduce you to some mid-range grease-bags, and he can get you a good deal on some slightly shop-soiled chickens, but the people who can make KPMG look the other way or use Bain to gut a whole country’s revenue service are probably not taking his calls any more.

So who’ll foot the bill?

The answer, I suspect, is true believers, diehard Zuma zealots like Mzwanele Manyi and poor old Carl, still clinging to the dream that their idol will return, Napoleon-like, to the throne and make it rain on his most loyal footstools.

I don’t doubt their passion, or, indeed, their generosity. I genuinely believe that Niehaus would give Zuma everything he owns, including the plastic Pick n Pay packet in which it all fits. There’s also absolutely no shame in selling another print run of Zuma’s book from the boot of a car parked outside McDonald’s again: Lord knows most writers have done the same, and I’m definitely going to try it for my next book.

But once Niehaus has given his all, and Manyi’s sold every last copy, Zuma will still be short about R7.79m, and that’s an awfully big figure when you’re trying to cobble it together from donations of R5,000 from the Nkandla chapter of Patriots Against Black People Who Become Too Clever.

No, I’m afraid Carl and Manyi have some tough months ahead of them. In for a penny, in for many, many pounds ...