TOM EATON | Oh, and by the way, I forgot to mention this earlier ...

Jacob Zuma’s revelation over the weekend that he served two terms as president on the back of illegitimate elections was quite the bombshell. But there was another, more specific claim that was no less startling.

In retrospect, Zuma’s interview with Sunday Times political editor Sibongakonke Shoba started quietly enough, with a familiar rehashing of Zuma’s current political project, dedicated to the two noble ideals of staying out of jail and living off other people’s money, and an inevitable reference to May’s elections and how, according to evidence he’s definitely going to show us as soon as the fabrication team is finished, Zuma was robbed.

To the former president, the implications of this imaginary event were clear: until electoral laws are changed so that votes can be counted in a way he approves of (presumably some sort of Royal Counting Vizier transcribing as he intones “Seventy-thousand million, listen carefully”), there is, in Zuma’s words, “no democracy” in South Africa.

Again, this wasn’t anything we haven’t heard from the MK Party pyramid scheme lately. But when Shoba gently pointed out to Zuma that he had been democratically elected, twice, things got very dramatic indeed.

“There was no democracy,” said Zuma, clearly referring to the period in which he was president. “I said it even at that time. I have questioned it all the time.”

Ten years ago, this would have been the point at which Mac Maharaj burst into the room to spray the place with lies and denial. But Maharaj and his gaslighting are no more, and so all I have to go on are my lying eyes and the spectacle of a man who thinks the best way to distance himself from his past is to claim that he and his party stole at least two elections.

I’m not really sure how one starts to get to grips with that intensity of derangement and cognitive dissonance, and I haven’t tried. But I have found myself intrigued by Zuma’s second claim, the one where he says he tried to warn us about the non-existence of South African democracy even when he was president.

At first, I had some uncharitable questions, like why Zuma hadn’t brought it up at either of his inaugurations, perhaps pausing with his hand on the Bible and saying, “So listen, there’s something I need to tell you and you might want to sit down ...”

Then again, I reflected, perhaps this was unfair. Perhaps he’d simply been overcome with nerves. I mean, if you or I were on national TV, pretending to take an oath to uphold the constitution while we knew we could barely uphold ourselves without regular cash infusions from a dying Schabir Shaik, we’d probably forget some of our lines, too.

Perhaps, I thought, if he has been questioning democracy “all the time”, it’s been under less taxing circumstances, like brunch with Tom Moyane. (That’s a Sars joke, by the way. I felt quite proud of it when I wrote it because I thought it was pretty hard to turn Sars into a joke, but then I remembered Zuma and Moyane did it without breaking a sweat, so I’m less proud of it now.)

Still, I thought, there must be one or two examples on record of Zuma revealing that “there was no democracy” from when he was first appointed president until he was fired. And so I went looking.

What I found was confusing, like his state of the nation address in 2009 in which, instead of telling us that there was no democracy, he reported that “millions of South Africans went out to cast their votes”, that they “exercised their democratic right” and that he and the ANC were “humbled by this decisive electoral mandate given by the people of our country”.

Five years later, in another SONA, he still hadn’t found the ideal moment to break the news to us, instead claiming that “we have built strong institutions of democracy” while promising to build monuments to struggle heroes who “delivered the freedom and democracy we enjoy today”.

Perhaps biding his time, he proceeded to sign off on the presidency’s review for 2014/15, an official document which claimed that 2014 “began with South Africa holding another round of peaceful and democratic elections, which demonstrated once again that our country has become a matured democracy”.

What was I to make of all of this? Surely Zuma wasn’t — reader, do not blush — a liar?

But then, at last, I found something that proved Zuma had been telling the truth.

During a rowdy question-and-answer session in parliament in 2012, Zuma had been getting into with former opposition leader Lindiwe Mazibuko. A performer in his element, he laughed and needled, speaking from the heart; and what he said still reverberates down the years.

“We have more rights here because we are a majority,” Zuma told Mazibuko. “You have fewer rights because you are a minority. Absolutely, that’s how democracy works.”

And there it was. Proof. Zuma has been doubting democracy for decades: the way its nit-picking institutions keep getting in the way of robust majoritarianism; how those goddamned voters keep thinking for themselves instead of prostrating themselves before the god-king; whether it is even capable of giving him what he wants. He’s just been doing it in private.

What a relief it must be not to have to hide it any more.