TOM EATON | Zuma’s cowardly stalling tactics have nothing to do with Stalingrad

Say what you like about Jacob Zuma, but the man knows how to play the helpless victim for his bunker full of swivel-eyed cultists, and his lawsuit against journalist Karyn Maughan (how dare a mere woman make eye contact with the God-King?!) once again has the believers rocking and rolling in the plywood pews.

Earlier this week, as it emerged that he was pursuing a private prosecution against Maughan and advocate Billy Downer, claiming that they had illegally acquired and published his private medical records, the Zumies took to Twitter like a thousand prosperity preachers who’ve just bought a year’s supply of Doom.

A few people who are in touch with reality, including the SA National Editors Forum, tried to explain that Zuma’s medical records had been attached to court papers last year and were therefore fair and legal game for Maughan.

The appeal of being a paid-up member of a personality cult, however, is that you never have to read words, and the Zumies were noisily adamant: a person’s private medical records should never, ever, under any circumstances be interrogated by the media.

In other words, no public official seeking to avoid jail time by faking an ailment should ever be exposed as a malingering liar. I hope they remember this precedent when one of their political opponents pulls a Shaik and contracts one of these oddly slow-acting fatal diseases we have in SA these days.

It goes without saying that Maughan is not only an excellent journalist but a very brave and determined one too: the amount of abuse she’s received over the years would have broken most of us and forced the rest to change careers. All I can hope is that she takes this noise from whence it comes, namely, the fart-catchers and footstools of a disgraced has-been desperately trying to stay out of jail.

Indeed, it’s why I’ve become so tired of reading that Zuma is using a “Stalingrad” legal defence.

It’s a catchy phrase, to be sure, and catnip for journalists and columnists who want to conjure an idea of epic, attritional conflict; but I think it gives the man and his hangers-on far too much credit.

The Battle of Stalingrad, after all, was a bloody and brutal fight to the death to decide the fate of the planet. It required almost superhuman courage and grit by the Russian defenders, and killed or maimed almost two million people.

All I can hope is that she takes this noise from whence it comes, namely, the fart-catchers and footstools of a disgraced has-been desperately trying to stay out of jail.

Zuma’s court shenanigans decide almost nothing except the location and cuisine of his final years. He has done nothing but sit in various chairs in various heated or air-conditioned rooms, and all it has cost is other people’s money and the annoyance of having to meet lawyers and shake off the odd former media tycoon humping his leg.

Indeed, given the destruction he oversaw as president, and the millions of lives that destruction has ruined, and the millions more it will ruin in the future, you might argue that sitting on his backside for a few hours a week is literally the least he could do, short of snoozing in his bed in Nkandla.

No, it’s time to retire “Stalingrad” from SA’s media lexicon.

If journalists still want a Russian metaphor to describe Zuma’s strategy, they might consider replacing “Stalingrad” with the more apt “Moscow”, a place in thrall to an old world patriarch, rotten with corruption and addled by self-pitying propaganda.

Then again, Moscow is still an extremely impressive city, with excellent public transport and many thriving businesses.

So perhaps let’s just call this latest prosecution what it is: another frantic dash towards another temporary hiding place by a coward trying to outrun the consequences of his own monumental failure.