A stranger to justice

Zuma’s new strategy is bold but transparent [View this email in your browser]( March 2, 2022 [Mail & Guardian]( [Mail & Guardian]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Instagram]( [YouTube]( Hi there, Albert Camus’s The Stranger is considered one of the great works of existential fiction. The story follows Meursault, a genial French settler in colonial Algiers and a man that struggles to care much about anything; what philosophers would call an absurdist. When we meet him he has just learned of his mother’s death. He travels to her funeral but refuses to engage in the usual societal platitudes — declining to look inside the coffin and instead spending the time drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. In the following days he even enters into a new relationship while also finding time to befriend his neighbour, who everyone else swears is a pimp. It is in the course of that friendship that he gets into a scuffle and ends up shooting and killing one of the antagonisers. At his subsequent murder trial, the prosecutor treats the facts of the incident as a sidenote. Instead he focuses on Meursault’s callous behaviour during and after his mother’s funeral. What kind of monster would drink and smoke over his mother’s corpse and then get laid the very next day? The strategy is successful and the book’s narrator is sentenced to the guillotine. (Fun fact: for all its claims of being civilised, France decapitated people in this way until the late 1970s). There are a number of themes worthy of discussion in The Stranger, but arguably the most strongest is the inevitable downfall of those that dare to be different. As Camus himself wrote: “I summarised The Stranger … with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.” This is what one Jacob G Zuma would have us believe is happening to him. Throughout the years, Msholozi’s various defences can be easily catalogued. By now everyone knows about his Stalingrad tactics: a ploy to hunker down and outlast your enemy. More recently, there was the martyr gambit during his quarrel with the constitutional court. [As we wrote at the time in the Ampersand]( Zuma was clearly trying to colour his situation in the same shade as Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial; portraying himself as someone ready to die for his principles. Building on that he has now fully fortified his straw man argument. According to Zuma, the various charges and allegations that have been brought against him are not fuelled by evidence but instead by personal feelings about his character. A key part of this strategy is to discredit the institutions currently working to engineer his downfall. This is why the wording of his representatives this morning strikes one as deliberate. As Paddy Harper reports, Zuma’s spokesperson, Mzwanele Manyi, said the findings of the Zondo commission’s third report that he had “accepted gratification” from Bosasa in return for his influence are [“not even worth the paper they are written on”](. The commission, of course, had [last night recommended that Zuma]( and various associates — notably Nomvula Mokonyane and Gwede Mantashe — be charged for those actions. The report noted: “On a regular basis, Bosasa provided full security solutions at the residences of ministers, senior politicians and senior government officials. To facilitate the assistance, a special team known as the special projects team was created.” Through the Manyi lens, those words are blurry and irrelevant. Our responsibility, as readers and journalists, is to evaluate the facts with a clear view and not be dragged into traps that might obfuscate our thinking. Zuma wants to be a stranger to the South African justice system — the facts suggest we cannot allow that to happen. Until next time, Luke Feltham [Subscribe now]( Enjoy The Ampersand? Share it with your friends [Share]( [Share]( [Tweet]( [Tweet]( [Forward]( [Forward]( [Share]( [Share]( Copyright © 2022 Mail & Guardian Media LTD, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive communications from the Mail & Guardian either at our website or by taking out a print subscription. Our mailing address is: Mail & Guardian Media LTD 25 Owl St BraamfonteinJohannesburg, Gauteng 2001 South Africa [Add us to your address book]( Want to change which mails you receive from Mail & Guardian? [Update your preferences]( to tell us what you do and don't want to receive, or [unsubscribe](. *If you are a paying subscriber, we recommend updating your preferences rather than unsubscribing, as you may miss important information relating to your subscription.