Jacob Zuma

Jacob Zuma: A Smile and a Machine Gun

Forty minutes before the midnight deadline on 7 July 2021, a seventy-nine-year-old man left his homestead at Nkandla and surrendered himself at Estcourt Correctional Centre. Jacob Zuma had been sentenced to fifteen months for contempt of the Constitutional Court, becoming the first South African head of state jailed since the end of apartheid. Within days KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng were burning. His Zulu middle name, Gedleyihlekisa, is usually rendered as "one who smiles while causing you harm" — a name his enemies never tired of quoting back at him.

A Boyhood Without a Classroom

He was born on 12 April 1942 at Nkandla in what was then Natal. His father Nobhekisisa, a policeman, died when Zuma was five; his mother Geinamazwi worked as a domestic servant. He received no formal schooling at all — a fact that shaped every subsequent chapter, since everything he knew he acquired from other people, in conversation, on the move. He joined the African National Congress in 1959, at seventeen, and the South African Communist Party in 1963.

Robben Island, Exile, Intelligence

In 1962 he became active in uMkhonto weSizwe, the ANC's newly formed armed wing. That same year he was arrested near Zeerust with forty-five other recruits and convicted of conspiring to overthrow the state. He served ten years on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, refereeing prisoners' football matches for the Makana Football Association — and, by all accounts, completing his education there.

He left South Africa in 1975, met Thabo Mbeki in Swaziland, and in Mozambique handled the flood of young exiles seeking military training after the 1976 Soweto uprising. He joined the ANC National Executive Committee in 1977 and the Politico-Military Council in 1983, serving as the movement's chief representative in Maputo until his expulsion in January 1987. At the Lusaka headquarters he was made head of underground structures and then chief of the intelligence department — the ANC's spymaster. He returned home on 21 March 1990, weeks after the movement was unbanned, and made his name again as a negotiator in the vicious ANC–Inkatha conflict in KwaZulu-Natal.

The Long Climb and the Arms Deal

He stood for ANC secretary-general in 1991 and lost to Cyril Ramaphosa, taking the deputy post instead. He was elected ANC deputy president at Mafikeng in December 1997 and became deputy president of South Africa in June 1999 under Mbeki, later serving as chief mediator in the Burundi peace process.

Then came the arms deal. From late 2002 the National Prosecuting Authority investigated Zuma over the R30-billion arms procurement. In August 2003 the director of public prosecutions announced there was a "prima facie case" but declined to prosecute; the Public Protector subsequently found that statement improper. On 14 June 2005, after Zuma's financial adviser Schabir Shaik was convicted of making corrupt payments to him, Mbeki told Parliament it would be best "to release the honourable Jacob Zuma from his responsibilities." He was out.

Acquittal, Polokwane, Power

In December 2005 he was charged with raping a thirty-one-year-old woman publicly known as Khwezi. He pleaded not guilty, said the encounter was consensual, and was acquitted on 8 May 2006. The trial nonetheless left permanent marks: he acknowledged knowing the complainant was HIV-positive, and said he had showered afterwards to reduce the risk of transmission — an admission from the then head of the National AIDS Council that the cartoonist Zapiro turned into a showerhead he thereafter drew above Zuma's head in every cartoon.

He converted his humiliation into a movement. At the ANC's Polokwane conference on 18 December 2007 he defeated Mbeki for the party presidency by 2,329 votes to 1,505. The NPA reinstated sixteen charges days later; a court struck them down in September 2008 on a technicality, the judge suggesting political interference. Mbeki was recalled. The ANC took 65.9 percent in April 2009, and Zuma was inaugurated on 9 May.

The Presidency: Plans and Wreckage

His first term produced real machinery. He created the National Planning Commission under Trevor Manuel, which delivered the National Development Plan adopted in 2012; launched the Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme in 2011 and a R4-trillion National Infrastructure Plan in 2012; expanded social grants; and won broad praise for reversing his predecessor's AIDS denialism, with rising life expectancy the result. In December 2010 South Africa joined BRICS, described as the most important foreign-policy achievement of his administration. In December 2017 he announced free higher education for students from households earning under R350,000.

The cost side is equally documented. The debt-to-GDP ratio rose from around 28 percent at his inauguration to just over 50 percent by his resignation. Nedbank estimated that maladministration and corruption in his second term alone cost the economy R470 billion. Twelve cabinet reshuffles unsettled markets, most catastrophically the removal of finance minister Nhlanhla Nene in December 2015 and of Pravin Gordhan in March 2017; the march on the Union Buildings that followed, on Zuma's birthday, was called by the Mail & Guardian possibly the largest in post-apartheid history.

Nkandla, the Guptas, and the Fall

Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's report "Secure in Comfort," released on 19 March 2014, found that state-funded upgrades to his Nkandla homestead exceeded security needs and that he should repay. On 31 March 2016 the Constitutional Court held the report binding and ruled that Zuma had "failed to uphold the Constitution." Madonsela's follow-up report, "State of Capture," found prima facie evidence of impropriety involving Zuma and the Gupta family and ordered a commission of inquiry, which he finally established in January 2018 under Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo.

Zondo's findings were devastating. The commission recommended Zuma face corruption and racketeering charges for his role as a "willing enabler" at Transnet and over his links to the Guptas; one investigator estimated that close to R50 billion flowed from government to Gupta entities. Zuma and the Guptas denied wrongdoing. Zuma testified for three days in July 2019, calling the inquiry part of a decades-long "character assassination," then withdrew, defied summonses, and was convicted of contempt on 29 June 2021. Before all of that, on 14 February 2018, hours after police raided the Gupta compound, he resigned on live television: "No life should be lost in my name."

Why Jacob Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Zuma in a specific and narrow way, and the honest version is that no serious historian calls him a genius of intellect. He never sat in a classroom. What the record does document is an extraordinary faculty for reading people and organisations — the skill of a lifelong intelligence officer. He ran the ANC's underground networks in exile because he could judge whom to trust; he brokered a stand-down in the KwaZulu-Natal killing fields because he could sit with Inkatha men who wanted him dead; he mediated in Burundi; and he took the ANC presidency from a sitting head of state with a doctorate and a machine, using nothing but branch-level loyalty and a struggle song.

That is political genius in the tactical sense: an unmatched instinct for where power actually sits inside an organisation, and infinite patience in accumulating it. It is not policy intelligence, and it is not vision. The counter-case is the whole second half of his presidency. A man who could read a room could not, or would not, read a balance sheet, and the Zondo Commission concluded that the same networks of personal loyalty that made him unbeatable inside the ANC were exactly what allowed the state's institutions to be hollowed out. His survival instinct was real; it eventually became the only thing he was governing for.

Legacy

He did not leave. In December 2023 he threw his weight behind a new party named after the guerrilla army he had joined in 1962, uMkhonto weSizwe, and became its president. In the May 2024 election it took 14.58 percent and 58 seats, displacing the Democratic Alliance as the official opposition and gutting the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal. The Constitutional Court ruled Zuma ineligible to sit in Parliament because of his contempt conviction; the ANC expelled him in July 2024. His arms-deal trial, on twelve counts of fraud, two of corruption and one each of racketeering and money laundering, has still not reached a verdict. He remains the most consequential politician South Africa's democracy has produced after Mandela, and the most damaging.

Achievements

• President of South Africa (2009–2018)
• vice president (1999–2005)
• member of the National Assembly of South Africa (2014–2014)
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
• Order of José Martí
• Order of the Eagle of Zambia
• Order of the Republic of Serbia