Welcome Comrade Zuma, SA’s first African ruler

South Africa is about to elect its first African president.

A 66 year-old man who learnt to read and write in prison, was indicted for corruption, a populist politician with a strong tribal appeal, a revolutionary of Umkhonto we Sizwe for which he was intelligence chief, Jacob Zuma is the next ruler of South Africa. Mr Zuma is what my grandfather would have a described as a man with a strong thigh, five wives and/or fiancés and counting with 18 children out of his loins.

I have visited South Africa a couple of times. It is a huge, beautiful and rich land. It is also a disturbed nation with a history of the worst and most recent organized racism on earth.

It is easy to see why in some analysis it is seen as two countries in one: There is the rich, technologically advanced, urban South Africa which is still white-dominated and the poor, mainly rural, African half which is Third World in every aspect.

The first has money, the second has the votes. Former President Thabo Mbeki, by managing the economy and the state so well, took very good care of the first but neither did he bond with nor deliver the fast change that the second expected.

Mr Mbeki was at home in the rich half of the country to which he naturally belonged as the scion of a leading ANC family.

Mr Zuma, on the other hand, is of the poor, great, unwashed, African mass. The son of a policeman and a house girl, the other half thinks he is a corrupt buffoon, a clown and an embarrassment.

His people think he is the saviour who will bring wealth, power and privilege to the marginalized Africans. He must be a very clever man to have come as far as he has without the benefits of a formal education and connections.

As a political schemer, he is brilliant, as can be seen from the way he outmanoeuvred Mr Mbeki and the many roadblocks that have been placed on his path, from the rape trial to the corruption circus.

Fate has also smiled upon him; he has the support and affection of Nelson Mandela. Many people might think that this could be because Mr Mandela found Mr Mbeki a difficult man.

It has been reported that Mr Mandela would take many days to get through to Mr Mbeki whenever he wished to speak to him. But there is history and tribal sensitivities at play.

Mr Mandela has always wrestled with the fact that the ANC was at risk of being seen as a preserve of the Xhosa nation; many of his comrades at the top of the party during the struggle were, like him, sons or daughters of the Transkei.

I would expect that the old school of the ANC would welcome an early opportunity to have a Zulu at the helm of the ANC and the nation. Mr Zuma is that opportunity.

Mr Zuma has said all the right things to the right people. To the first South Africa, he has said there will be no change in economic policy, and that he will respect all those things that need to be respected; he is asking for forgiveness and reconciliation; he says he won’t fix Mr Mbeki for trying to fix him and all that.

I have seen one newspaper reporting that Mr Zuma talks Davos-speak very well. But a few things have been escaping through the edges. Mr Zuma, in an interview this week, said judges, many of whom have tried him, have too much power, they are not God and that he would like to “engage” them on that.