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Chikane is biased and not telling us everything about Mbeki

THE day before he was fired, then deputy president Jacob Zuma was impeccably dressed in a sky blue linen suit, showing no signs of distress..

He looked relaxed and charming as usual. He fielded questions on television from Xolani Gwala on Asikhulume with ease. But deep inside, he was hurting. Thabo Mbeki was to fire him the next day.

Earlier that day, Zuma had addressed a Cosatu provincial shop stewards council in Durban, disrupting our ANC ward 26 branch general meeting at the same venue as we abandoned it, rushing to see JZ.

Even there, he seemed jolly, singing, joking and laughing. None of us knew that a knife had been plunged deep into his heart by a man who was once his best friend and brother.

During a week of endless speculation, Mbeki was out of the country. But just four days before firing JZ, the two comrades were together in Parliament.

We stared at them , hoping to find a hint of uneasiness between them. Nothing. They were all smiles.

Rumours of Zuma's possible sacking had been doing the rounds for a month since Judge Hillary Squires handed down his judgment in the Schabir Shaik trial. None of us believed Mbeki could be that cruel. Having been our president in the ANC for eight years, clearly, we still knew nothing about him.

On June 14, JZ was fired. Mbeki's reasoning hid behind a false statement that Squires "made findings against the accused and at the same time pronounced on how these matters relate to our deputy president, the Hon Jacob Zuma". The judge had made no such statement, but Mbeki had no qualms using this false statement as his feeble excuse.

Actually, Squires had made himself clear: corruption is a bilateral affair, and the absence of Zuma had hamstrung him in making a complete judgment and thus he could not find as had been alleged by the prosecution that there "was a generally corrupt relationship" between JZ and Shaik.

Never to allow the truth to take the place of a good story, newspapers rushed to print and said Squires found that there was indeed a "generally corrupt relationship" between Shaik and Zuma. This claptrap was to do the rounds for years until Squires himself wrote a letter to the now defunct Weekender correcting this.

Mbeki made his decision on the basis of a newspaper article. But he did not tell this to Parliament. Instead, he lied : "I have since carefully studied the judgment."

If he did, he may have done so with closed eyes.

Soon after he was fired, Zuma was charged with corruption. His house was raided by armed investigators in the wee hours, waking up a 63-year-old man. Then he was accused of rape and dragged to court to answer what was later concluded by a court of law to have been a spurious allegation.

In the middle of his rape trial, we invited Zuma to address our SRC inauguration in Durban. He looked terrible. The Zuma we had seen on Asikhulume almost nine months earlier was still happy, but his health had deteriorated. His smile was no longer believable. He was in pain. Neither his smile nor his jovial character could hide that. The treatment he was receiving at the hands of his old comrades had taken a toll on him. I felt for him. Icould do nothing but express my support. He asked for donations like a pauper. No one must ever go through that.

The insider that he has always been, Frank Chikane should tell the public how JZ was humiliated. And since he seems to know so much, he must also tell us why. The fact that our honoured cleric finds no reason to write about this exposes his bias.

  • Ndamase is an ANC member and works in the ministry of communications.

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