Zuma challenges ANC to confront them as disciplinary hearing rescheduled

Jacob Zuma prefers an in-person disciplinary hearing over a virtual one to address charges of tarnishing the ANC’s reputation by founding the rival uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party.

Zuma was due to sit virtually in front of the ANC’s national disciplinary committee on Wednesday, 17 July, but failed to pitch for the hearing. Instead, his representative, former ANC national executive committee (NEC) member Tony Yengeni attended the meeting alone to relay Zuma’s wish for a physical hearing.

According to reports, Zuma deems a virtual hearing to be unfair and has cited network connectivity problems at his rural Nkandla homestead as an obstacle to his participation.

WHAT GAME IS JACOB ZUMA PLAYING?

However, ANC insiders are not buying his excuses for shunning a virtual hearing, with sentiments being Zuma wants to physically appear at Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg, so he can mobilise for MK Party and embarrass his former party on their home turf.

For now, Zuma’s disciplinary hearing has been postponed to 23 July 2024 and it seems the former two-term ANC president will not get his wish, after the party released a statement saying the hearing would proceed virtually.

ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang believes Zuma has ulterior motives behind insisting on a physical hearing and delaying his day of reckoning with the party.

“We are playing into the hands of whatever Jacob Zuma wants to do,” said Msimang

Msimang said there was a lot frustration among people in the party about the dragging out of this disciplinary process, adding that with the new government of national unity in play, the Zuma issue had become a “serious distraction”.

“We should have got it done months ago,” Msimang told Newzroom Afrika’s Xoli Mngambi on Wednesday evening.

Msimang was referring to earlier in the year when ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said Zuma had already expelled himself from the party by starting the breakaway MK Party and campaigning for it.

And technically, Zuma is still an ANC member, although he has been suspended

TONY YENGENI’S INVOLVEMENT

Zuma’s choice to call on ANC outcast Tony Yengeni for help is an interesting one.

Yengeni, like Zuma, is a vocal critic of President Cyril Ramaphosa and has increasingly been isolated from the ANC, starting when he failed to make it onto the party’s NEC – the highest decision-making body – after the 55th national elective conference in December 2022.

Additionally, Yengeni was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison after he was found to have received a discount on a Mercedes-Benz SUV from one of the bidders for a contract during the Arms Deal procurement period. Yengeni was the ANC’s chief whip in Parliament when he received the car in 1998.

He was released from prison on 15 January 2007, barely four months after being incarcerated.

So with Zuma’s own Arms Deal-linked trial set to start next April, this means the MK Party leader has called upon an acolyte who has faced similar criminal litigation, over a related case.

In Zuma’s case, the State alleges that during his time as deputy president of South Africa, he received bribes from a French arms firm Thales via his then-financial adviser Schabir Shaik.

The bribes were made in order to protect Thales from any future scrutiny emanating from contracts during South Africa’s procurement of arms in the late 1990s.

Shaik was jailed for 15 years in 2005 for his part in the scheme, where he solicited a bribe on behalf of Zuma from Thint, the local subsidiary of Thales. He was released on medical parole in 2009.