IT IS hard to believe but there is already chatter among fairly senior and well-informed people in Government about whether President Jacob Zuma will see out 2010, let alone his whole term, in office. I must admit I completely underestimated the political damage that the latest baby scandal has done to him. He is trying to claw his way back with political ploys like a national ethics debate but they are easy to see through. He really is in big trouble. The most obvious thing keeping him in office isn’t so much his popularity as the absence of an alternative. 

I can’t see Kgalema Motlanthe stepping up to the plate as a temp again and, anyway, a weak leader may be just what, for their own reasons, the ANC’s many factions and alliance partners want. While he fumbles, they plot. You can forget decisions, I fear. SAA took almost a year to make the appointment it was always going to make to replace Khaya Ngcula. Transnet drifts on without resolution. 

Not even Julius Malema can do much to help Zuma in the short term. A few months ago the mere touch of the Malema finger was enough to get the dogs off Free State University Rector Jonathan Jansen. But now, enmeshed in a growing enrichment scandal that might see him face charges one day, Malema can’t help anyone. 

The Editor of the Sunday Independent, Makhudu Sefara, recounted in his column yesterday the story of a businessman who tapped Malema for a R10 000 loan at a party just before last December. Malema flipped the man his bank card and gave him the PIN and the man drew the money. The slip that followed showed the balance in the account to be R53m! 

It is a breathtaking amount but, if the story is true, it would make it much easier to prosecute him. It would be impossible for him to have accumulated anything remotely like that legally. All that is required for the truth to be revealed is cross examination in a court of law. 

Mind you, we must not be morose. There are silver linings. Jacob Zuma not making decisions might in fact be a good thing. Chris Wells is doing just fine at Transnet. Ditto Mpho Mokwana at Eskom. And if Julius Malema were genuinely poor he might be dangerously effective. Thanks to a world class business sector and the World Cup and the huge infrastructure plans put in place before Zuma became president, South Africa can live with bad government. Other countries do.

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TALKING of SAA, Siza Mzimela was always going to get the nod. Her challenge, now, moving from tiny SA Express to SAA is huge though. There are some fantastic airline people at SAA and they have kept it afloat through the many CEO disasters of the past. Acting CEO Chris Smyth is one. So are Jan Blake and chief pilot Johnny Woods. Both Smyth and Blake could run any part of, or the entire, business with their eyes closed, including finance. Legal counsel Louisa Zondo also brings a calm and balance to a difficult exco. Mzimela must try her best to retain these people and keep them busy. There were once fears she would bring her entire team over from SAX but that would be a big mistake. 

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I see Jesse Duarte is the latest victim of the chaos in Jacob Zuma’s office. I am not sure her resignation as (what?) will have any effect though. She was largely incoherent as ANC spokesman and what I read of her resignation note to the ANC yesterday was standard fare for Jesse. Didn’t understand a word. Maybe it’s just me. What was clear though is that the missing thing in our country is also missing in the leader’s office. It’s leadership.

Cheers 

Popularity: 6% [?]

IT IS good to know that one was right about Julius Malema all along. He is an idle leech who lives off government tenders – lots of them – and is exceedingly rich. People like Malema raise the cost of delivery in South Africa – to the detriment of the poor — because they cannot do the work they win tenders to do.

The story led the Sunday Times, Rapport and City Press. Either they had all been simultaneously stung into action by a story about Malema’s riches (only how he spends them, not how he makes them) earlier in the week in The Star, or someone in the know tipped off the Sunday papers about where to look. Most investigative journalism in South Africa these days arrives all neatly bundled on a journalist’s desk – someone else delivers the goods to the newspapers for whatever reason (grudge, mainly) in other words. I suspect you could count the number of real investigative journalists in this country on one hand.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

SOME of the things I write never appear in South Africa. I was asked by the Gulf News to write a piece about Madiba’s legacy, 20 years on. It appeared last week.

Nelson Mandela is quite aware that his funeral has already been minutely planned. The BBC has an aircraft ready to leave Stansted Airport for South Africa within five hours of his death, loaded with studios and editors and correspondents. It has booked its camera positions for the official state funeral. Local newspapers have their commemorative issues already written and set up, ready to print. Tony Blair will have written something. And Bill Clinton. Even yours truly has been booked as talking head on a major US network. Barack Obama will come and so will Fidel Castro.

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Popularity: 84% [?]

WHERE does President Jacob Zuma go now, after Babygate, the crystal-clear thumbs down it earned him from his own allies, and, then, to follow it up, an extremely poor State of the Nation speech? He will have to pull the proverbial rabbit out of his hat. But where is it ? If the country didn’t at least suspect it might be putting a flat tyre into the Presidency last year, it knows better now.

Zuma’s calls to action in Parliament last Thursday night, his promises to deliver accountable government, are empty. That’s partly because of the rotten example the ANC leadership already sets on governance and corruption. And partly because too many of the ministers he picked to help him run the country are simply incapable of doing their jobs. Not now. Not ever.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

WHAT AN unadulterated pleasure it has been to watch ANC Youth League Presidentresident Julius Malema sulk and pout and kick and scream since he was so rudely booed at the SA Communist Party congress last week. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Needless to say he has managed to persuade one or other press club to organise a press conference for him tomorrow (Tuesday). It’s a sure way of getting all the media to focus one just one thing (him) as he tells us what he’s going to do about it. I would love not to send anyone to cover it but starving a publicity addict of oxygen isn’t something you can do piecemeal.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

SO, ESKOM has backtracked on its demand that electricity tariffs rise by 45 per cent immediately. It now says 35 per cent will do.

But it won’t. It still has to be argued and justified and, frankly, there can’t be a case for it. Not a real case. That’s because Eskom’s acting CEO, Mpho Makwana, revealed yesterday, after announcing the slightly lesser tariff nightmare, that the company was considering partially privatising it’s yet-to-be-built R120bn Kusile power station.

That would be, um, in order to finance it. Kusile, planned for Mpumalanga, would pump out 4 800MW at its height, making it one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the world.

But here’s the thing. If Kusile can partly be funded by private capital, why not the rest of  Eskom’s build programme?  Why should industry and consumers pay for anything?

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Popularity: 12% [?]

MENZI SIMELANE, who has been named National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) by President Jacob Zuma, is a really nice guy, friendly and quick to laugh. But that doesn’t cut it in this job, unfortunately. All prosecutions in the country are run through the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which the NDPP heads.

Sadly for Simelane, he was forced to give evidence in chief for the Government at the so-called (Frene) Ginwala Inquiry into whether or not the previous NDPP, Vusi Pikoli, was fit for office. Former president Thabo Mbeki, who suspended Pikoli, didn’t think so and wanted Pikoli to desist from arresting the former National Commissioner of Police, Jackie Selebi (if you’re new in SA, read this slowly) back in 2007 before the ANC congress where Zuma ousted Mbeki as party leader. Mbeki didn’t want Selebi in Zuma’s camp.

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AS A NEWSPAPER editor I am blessed with wonderful colleagues. In this business, as in most no doubt, the moment you’re the boss and you start thinking you’re the smartest guy in the room you’re in loads of trouble.

My job is to make other, smarter, journalists famous and over the years, particularly on the opinion and editorial pages of Business Day, I have tried to do that. I think it’s paid off too.

One of those colleagues is my friend Tim Cohen. He is far and away the most widely informed and opinionated guy I know. He told me once that his dad used to force him to argue with him. He wasn’t allowed not to have an opinion about things. The result is a writer who is in thought mode all the time and when The Weekender closed I moved as fast as possible to ensure his fabulous Weekender column moved on to Business Day.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

NEWS that the South African Ballet Theatre (SABT) is in trouble is very sad but, perhaps, not surprising. Whole banks have vanished in this recession and a struggling ballet company at the bottom of Africa could hardly be expected to escape the storm.

The SABT is what was once PACT. Its dancers, jobless when the state closed PACT down, formed their own company. It is hard to describe what a feat that must have been for people utterly removed from business in their day to day vocation.

For the last decade though the SABT has been able to bring world class ballet to Johannesburg and to provide unbelievable learning opportunities to children in Alexandra.

Now they are in a financial hole. They need R2m to keep going at the rate they have been after some big sponsors withdrew funding. One of those was FNB, which has its eye only on a successful SWC next year. Surely this can be done? These people are not rich or stuck up and they work damn hard. A principle dancer earns less than R15 000 a month.

The thing about ballet that we lose as a country if the SABT goes down is discipline in dance. Some folk say its “eurocentric” and stuff like that but they need to get over themselves. Ballet prepares you for a life in dance the way a good piano grounding prepares you for a life as a musician. It is the very essence of any dance.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

AS WE said in an editorial the other day, Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan is on a hiding to nothing. It is hard to think of a single decision she might make or not make that would satisfy everyone, even in her own Cabinet. The way she gets out of that bind is just to make decisions, as best as she can. Indecision is the enemy of this particular government. We had never, in all my time as editor of Business Day, ever written an editorial suggesting someone resign. The one about her came closest. We said she should consider her position after the Eskom cock-up.
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Popularity: 18% [?]