** Update at the end

I SEE that President Jacob Zuma has had to remind the ANC’s partners who is boss! Good. Well I thought ‘good’ until I read on. City Press said he had told an ANC national executive committee meeting the weekend before last that — and here was the let-down — ‘Cabinet ministers serve the ruling party only’. Of course, in context that is a stand of sorts. It is aimed at Cosatu and Communist Party critics of Trevor Manuel and his Planning Commission.

In the greater scheme of things, however, it is a concession, if not a surrender. In most mature parliamentary democracies, Cabinet Ministers serve the head of the government, or state. The prime minister or the president. Not here. Here it is the party that calls the shots. Here is where a party secretary general like Gwede Mantashe can dress down a minister directly if he or she drifts off the party line. In other countries that would be the president’s job.

Nothing is going to change Zuma and make him the leader the country wants him to be. He is never going to stand up and end a crisis like the one we have had at Eskom. He is never going to take sides in any dispute (even between his own ministers) ever. The refrain about the Cabinet being there solely to implement the Polokwane resolutions on behalf of the party is the reality.

This means that wherever implementing one of the Polokwane resolutions proves problematic (and they all will be problematic) nothing will happen. That’s because he will have to go back to the party for direction and, so sad, the party couldn’t agree on the sum of two plus two right now and he daren’t – or won’t – stand up and say “this is what I want and this is the way it’s going to be”. Corruption, I guarantee you, will get worse. All we are getting now are words and a few suspensions on full pay. Soon, Zuma will have been president for a year. I would be amazed if one, just one, serious case of public or party corruption was before the courts by then.

Paralysis is the order of Government. It can’t help it because there is no leader — just a series of committees made up of people who never agree with each other. It is not about the ANC asserting itself, its about Jacob Zuma asserting himself. But, you have to ask, if he is being honest about wanting only one term, what does he have to lose?

………………………………………………

I’M FREE on Fridays these days. What to do? For a modest fee I could sub-edit the Sunday Independent’s editorials, or even that column Jeremy Gordin writes in it where he pretends to be a buxom blonde called Karen Bliksem. I like Gordin. His column is incredibly hard to follow most times (I had to read it twice yesterday before I was sure he was really writing about me!) but hilarious at the same time. I’m afraid I’ll irritate him by saying I think the newspaper is becoming a serious proposition again under its new editor, a chap called Makhudu Sefara. It has interesting news again and while the editorials are badly written, the paper bristles with intent once more.

Jeremy thinks, though, that the paper is finished and going to the dogs. He wrote a glorious (or vainglorious) blog on Moneyweb a few weeks ago where he argued that Sefara’s arrival would be accompanied by a brief excitement before he, too, ran into the realities of editing financially unviable newspaper. I can tell the new editor from experience that this is indeed what will happen to him, but Gordin’s blog was was screamingly funny nonetheless. He referred to one of the guys who runs Independent Newspapers here, Nazeem Howa, as “well balanced” because “he has chips on both shoulders”.

Gordin was, um, set free from Independent in a round of redundancies recently, but has kept his column. It was big of Howa to let that happen.

But is the Sunday Independent going to be the next newspaper to die? I hope not. Having just been through that trauma (and I still can’t shake The Weekender blues) I can do no better than quote you Gordin quoting nine year old Eric from the TV cartoon, South Park: “It sucks, dude, it sucks like a donkey’s balls.”

Cheers

**Late PS….. It turns out Jeremy Gordin no longer writes the Karen Bliksem column in the Sunday Independent. Oops! I know who does but let’s respect his anonymity for the moment. What is it at Independent that has all these men cross-writing as girls hmmm?

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