In the face of all these, will our role model please stand up

Jacob Zuma is what is called a character. He generates excitement, disgust, controversy, admiration and envy all rolled into one, in equal measure.

He is never dull. At 67, he fathered a child born last October with a 39-year-old daughter of the man in charge of the organisation of the upcoming World Cup, who is a buddy of the president.

The cute newborn brings the tally of Zuma’s known children to 20. No doubt there are others we don’t know who he has not necessarily sired with his harem of wives, which incidentally got a voluptuous new addition only last month.

Zuma’s World Cup organiser friend, whose daughter the president had seduced, was an invited guest at the nuptials. Already, Zuma is betrothed to yet another girl and the traditional wedding ceremony should be formalised before the year is out.

One admirable thing about Zuma is that he is not a hypocrite. He happily flaunts polygamy and its place in Zulu culture. At the recent World Economic Forum at Davos, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria sought, unsuccessfully, to make fun of Zuma’s situation.

It did not occur to the journalist to put the same questions to a bunch of wealthy Arab sheikhs who were attending the same Forum, and whose custom allows them to keep extremely well-stocked harems of their own.

There are those who believe Zuma is merely using culture to cover up his womanising. One South African MP has suggested the president take the cue from golfer Tiger Woods and seek treatment for “sex addiction”. Others are telling him to stop behaving like a turbo-charged village ram and, being a president, set a good example.

Such easy moralising can be problematic. Wasn’t Bill Clinton supposed to be a role model also, that is until Americans discovered what use he put to his cigars?

The question is, who should be our role models? Is it Mwai Kibaki, who recently sent the media into another orgy of hypocritical babble because of two notable functions he did not want them to cover? Is it the religious crowd, once it is through conning us with “miracle” babies?

Not too long ago, a study done in South Africa showed that over 70 per cent of married couples had been unfaithful more than once. There is no reason to suppose the figure is any different here.

Are we to assume, then, that all those affecting rage against Zuma’s behaviour — in South Africa and elsewhere — fall in the sanctified 30 per cent?

Sure, Zuma should go easy with his drive, but I doubt even if he did South Africa’s, and our own, atrocious HIV infection rates will go down.

In an act of obscene irony, Thabo Mbeki had once appointed Zuma to head something the South African government was calling the “moral regeneration programme”. Preaching “family values” was presumably part of the brief. But such crass cynicism is far from being unusual in high politics.

Last week, President Barack Obama chastised Ugandans for contemplating a law that could send serial sodomists to the gallows.

Obama comes from a society where homosexuality is being accepted as a normal “lifestyle”. Fair enough. If the world can consent to homosexual relationships, what’s the big deal about a man marrying several wives? What sort of family did Obama come from himself?