Zuma Quotes

The comparing mind is a despairing mind.

Having been in the presidency from the time of Mandela to that of Zuma, I am one of the privileged few who has seen it all, rather than hearing it via the grapevine. The challenge is say 'the things I could not say' in a responsible way that helps the country to move forward rather than backwards.

She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.

When a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, requests breakfast and taxi money. In the morning that lady requested breakfast and taxi money. You don't ask for taxi money from somebody who raped you.

This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal value, as relevant to an African village as it is to Westminster. If you are unable to keep your appetites in check, you are inevitably going to live beyond your means. And this means you are going to become vulnerable to patronage and even corruption. That is why Jacob Zuma's 'polygamy' is his achilles heel.

Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.

There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court—and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.

Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.

What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people!

The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do.

What in Mandela was seen as an almost saintly ability to conciliate could, in a lesser man, be read as weak-kneed populism.

Size matters not. Inertia, however, is a pain in the butt." -Mander Zuma

Instead of recruiting Cuban doctors or Zimbabwean teachers, my advice to President Zuma is to solicit the support of His Holiness, and to rope in nuns from all over the world to teach our children.

Only after Zuma has looked after himself comes the small little problem of governing the Republic and its millions and millions of hungry, uneducated and jobless voters who are looking to him for salvation and deliverance.

What I have revealed is an orgy of depravity and venality, and if there is any attempt to stop the publishing of this book, it will be because they do not want you to know about it.

She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most people.

But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy? The world will care.

By walking, she tells her students, is how you make the road.

Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man's genetic material?

There is no dispute: Jacob Zuma has ripped the society and state to shreds. He swore at his inauguration to be faithful to our country and that he would observe, uphold and maintain our beautiful Constitution. It was all bullshit.

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe. In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees.

Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.

Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.

Whatever frees Gin Percival to leave her hair twiggy and wear shapeless sack dresses and smell unwashed—the wife wants that.

Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?' A few faces smile, uneasy. Even louder: 'How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?

But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve.

Here was a temporary solution. Parole would get Mofokeng and Mokoena out of jail as quickly as possible. Other details could be sorted out later. I accompanied Nyambi to Kroonstad jail at the end of October and remember that as he told Mofokeng and Mokoena the news—that they would be home for Christmas—smiles slowly but surely transformed the sombre, cautious expressions on their faces. Big problem: it was discovered in December, a full two months after the judgment was made, that the court order does not mention the NCCS at all. Consequently, the NCCS interpreted the court's order as having removed the NCCS's jurisdiction to deal with any "lifers" sentenced pre-1994. The members of the NCCS packed their briefcases and went home. No one knows why the judgment didn't mention the NCCS; maybe the judge who wrote it, Justice Bess Nkabinde, simply didn't know how the parole system operates; but eight of her fellow judges, the best in the land, found with her. The Mofokeng and Mokoena families, who are from 'the poorest of the poor', as the ANC likes to say, are distraught. But the rest—the law men, the politicians and the government ministers—well, quite frankly, they don't seem to give a fig. Zuma has gone on holiday, to host his famous annual Christmas party for children. Mapisa-Nqakula has also gone on holiday. Mofokeng and Mokoena remain where they were put 17 years ago, despite not having committed any crime.

The Zuma system resembled a medieval state in which the king or mafia don was owed fealty by mighty barons who paid him tribute and gave him political and military support if needed. Within their own baronies, the barons were almost absolute rulers, exacting tribute from those beneath them and exercising powers of patronage over lower-level appointments. Normally speaking, the king would not interfere with their administration though he did exercise powers of taxation over the whole populace. Only if a baron or his underlings exacted so much tribute as to cause a peasants’ revolt or create major scandal within the kingdom, would the king be forced to act – though naturally, any sign that a baron was no longer loyal to the king would trigger more severe action. The heart of the system was KwaZulu-Natal. Although the ANC there was just as prone to factional feuding as anywhere else, when it came to the crunch it would be bound to support the first Zulu president not only out of tribal loyalty but because of the rich rewards of patronage the province received as a result of its central position. With KwaZulu-Natal effectively sewn up, together with Free State and Mpumalanga, Zuma was invulnerable. Many commentators failed to understand this and, the wish being father to the thought, frequently speculated that the ANC might grow weary of the incessant cloud of scandal which hung over Zuma and decide to eject him, as it had ejected Mbeki. In fact this was quite impossible while the whole weight of tribal loyalty and

Get in the shower, she tells herself. Too sad to shower.

I have been lifted off the earth to sit on the ocean with men whose lives are nothing like mine yet whose waking dreams are identical: clumsy suits of caribou hide, our fingers numb, the flame- red gash of sunrise. If wrecked in this vessel, we wreck together.

I hate the chewy lard meat called pemmican; and I admit to fearing the attack of a sea bear; and my fingers hurt all the time; but I prefer immurement in these spectral wastes to a seat at the warmest hearth.

And ten years after adopting the most gay-friendly constitution in the world, South Africa, under judicial pressure, authorized same-sex marriage in 2006. It became the first—and for now the only—African country to authorize same-sex marriage (and the fifth in the world). Mandela’s future successor, Jacob Zuma, would be a virulent opponent of this law.

Doesn’t know for a fact that Gunni saved pieces of fermented lamb in his shoe when Eivør wasn’t allowed to have any, but she writes it in her book, because her own brother used to hide cookies in his napkin when their mother told the biographer she didn’t need more dessert unless she wanted to get chubby. Archie would leave the cookies in his drawer for her to retrieve. Each time she opened the drawer and saw the grease-darkened napkin tucked among socks, a flame of happiness lit in her throat.

For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. Virginia Woolf

If there was ever a capitalist finger up Lenin's waxy ass, it was the opening of the ultra-luxurious GUM store on the eastern border of the square, just a stone's throw from the mausoleum.

The problem with the recent history of crime intelligence is this: there is little honour, no moral compass, a complete lack of integrity. And that is why South Africans should be very, very concerned.

apathy that creates a breeding ground for the evil monsters that will in the end devour us all.

Ngcukana concluded that Zuma is the “ultimate traitor” for having subverted the police, the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the intelligence agencies.

the South Africa that Zuma has created has rendered sleazebags blameless, guiltless and even righteous.

Mínevudottír may have felt free; but she was a cog in a land-snatching, resource-sucking, climate-fucking imperialist machine.

MBEKI Pierre, born in 1905, Scotland. MANDELA Giovanna Rosaria l, born in the 1800s, Italy. ZUMA Andreas, born in 1750, Pologne. TWALO July, born in 1850, USA. MALEMA Jannis, born in 1750, Latvia. These are Surnames of key people in Africa. But they are also a few examples of how people really received their Surnames in Africa ...through colonisation.

Chief among his advisors, and swiftly appointed to head up the South African Secret Service when Zuma came to power in 2009, was Mo Shaik, the ANC underground operative who became the democratic South Africa’s first chief of National Intelligence. He was disgraced when he tried to besmirch the NPA head, Bulelani Ngcuka, in 2003. In the two and a half years preceding Jacob Zuma’s ascent to power at Polokwane, Shaik built a formidable network of volunteers, funders and recruiters to back Zuma’s campaign.26

Failure, disaster and collapse can arrive very quickly. Sometimes it can take years of the drip-drip effect, of small things going wrong and being left unfixed. One day you look around and realise that everything is broken, that your country has been stolen. That is what I fear the Zuma presidency has been doing to South Africa since the man came to power in 2009.

Zuma’s genius, and the source of my admiration of the man, stems from the fact that he has not just grabbed at the idea of changing editors and media managers. Zuma’s genius is that he understands power, and that power means having control of the money. Think about it. At the SABC he has chosen the chairman of the board and the foot soldiers, such as the man who lied about his qualifications and yet has now become chief operating officer of the corporation. At Independent Newspapers, which will be the biggest beneficiary of the decision to support only pliant press with government advertising, he has Survé in his pocket. At the New Age and the television channel ANN7, his son lives with the proprietors. At eNCA his biggest allies control the business. Zuma outsmarted all of us in the press who fingered him for his many failings. He is in charge of our salaries, of the purse strings. Our bosses are jumping to his every bidding. So are the journalists. He has won.

it is black people, my people, that you are betraying. It is black people who are unemployed, whose taxes you steal, whose lives you condemn to hopelessness and despair. It is black people who suffer when the institutions of state are rendered useless and cowed. It is black people – who the Zuma administration claims to be working for – who bear the brunt of the failure of the police, the courts, the state, to deliver on their mandates. These people didn’t fight and defeat apartheid for this. They didn’t fight and defeat apartheid to see their leaders feed at the trough while thousands go to bed hungry and cold.

The problem goes further than Zuma. Ordinary citizens will have to get out of the slump of dependency that so many of us have fallen into. Trade unions will have to stomach the idea that things have to change, and that the unemployed are as important as the employed. Principals and teachers will have to accept that supervision of schools will be stepped up. Business will have to accept that, without ethical leadership and participation in South Africa as a corporate citizen, the profit motive alone is just not good enough. It is bitter medicine, but it is medicine that we have to take. Reading the NDP document, it is clear that we could become a prosperous country within a relatively short period of time. But we need resolve at leadership level, we need non-partisanship, and we need to understand that this is the crossroads.

The writing of the NDP is one of the most significant achievements of the Zuma administration. For decades he will be remembered for setting up this institution of great men and women, who gave us a clear, implacable plan for us to make our country great for our children and their children.14 If he does not show leadership and begin following its recommendations, though, it will also be known down the ages as the great plan that never saw the light of day. It is not the NDP’s fine words that our children’s children will want to admire. They will want lights, water, comfort and dignity. We have a chance to give it to them in just a decade. Let’s do it.

The DA, however, was left with the toxic stink of the party of apartheid despite the fact that the NP had found its home in the warm bosom of the ANC. The DA has never been able to shake off this stink, hence the general perception that it was the party of privilege and of apartheid. Incredibly, survey respondents still express a fear that, if elected, the DA would ‘bring back apartheid’. Even the powerful memory of Helen Suzman – for years the lone voice of opposition in the apartheid parliament – cannot wipe this perception away.25 In the run-up to the 2014 election, the ANC was faced with a massive problem. Its president, Zuma, was discredited and was and remains by all accounts a liability.26 Its deployed cadres in government were mired in one scandal after another. Service delivery protests were spreading while Cosatu was imploding. Yet the party had its ‘shy voters’. It merely slipped from 65.9 per cent to 62 per cent of the vote. Given its problems and the bad press it received, the ANC fooled many among us. One London-based analyst had doggedly predicted that the ANC would fall to 55 per cent of the vote.27 He was wrong.

When being distracted by a sideshow, one should wonder what is happening in the big tent.

Whether you have to get to the top of the Kremlin or clamber up Jacob Zuma's slithery and gangrenous pole, politics is a messy business.

It is much quicker to fly from Johannesburg to Lagos than from Moscow to Vladivostok. I couldn't help thinking: can you imagine Jacob Zuma also ruling Nigeria, 4,600 kilometres to the north-west? The chaos and madness!

I want to write a book again,” I said to Sam on a blazingly hot afternoon on the veranda of the Red Tin Roof.

What is the typical spy? To start with, they think that they are on a mission to save the world. The worlds of Matt Damon and Daniel Craig are slick, fast-paced and sexy. Their suits never crinkle, women always say yes, and their cars shoot missiles. Real-life spy sagas unfold with far less panache. Overseas research has shown intelligence agents at the CIA to be often college graduates with low-value degrees; they are outsiders or loners, they have family or friends in the intelligence or armed services, they can't work with money and love firearms. Much of a spy's work these days is sifting through data.

I'm not a journalist any longer,” I told him. “I'm a chef!

I can basically go to prison or at least be prosecuted for what I have revealed to you about the PAN programme investigation. The SSA will argue that I have jeopardised national security and endangered the lives of agents. This is, of course, nonsense. I have not revealed any state secrets and have not endangered any operations that are genuinely in the interest of national security.

The campaign against the SARS “rogue unit” was driven by elements in the SSA ... Suffice it to say for now that the stories in the Sunday Times were bullshit, but they were integral to the destruction of the most effective law enforcement organisation in the country.

A pattern of appointing cronies and loyalists in key positions emerged at the outset of Zuma's presidency. He was mindful that he could still be brought to book for corruption in the future, and set in motion a shadow security state that would undermine the independence of the police and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).

Can you imagine charging one of the most powerful people in the country with treason and those around him with fraud and corruption?

We have become world leaders in income inequality, racial tension, rape and illicit financial outflows.

Zuma vowed at his inauguration: “This is a moment of renewal. I will devote myself to the well-being of the Republic and all of its people.

It is often said that Zuma is proof that anyone, even from the humblest beginnings, can rise to the top. A son of a domestic worker mother and policeman father who died when he was a young boy, Zuma was chiselled from the land north of the Tugela River in KwaZulu-Natal. Called the land of hills, honey and cobras, it is an area tormented by poverty and stands in stark contrast to the rolling sugar estates and “white monopoly capital” on the other side of the Tugela.

Zuma is one of the most lampooned and jeered heads of state in the world and can easily be brushed aside as an uneducated peasant – yet he is in fact a brilliant strategist.

The leader of the delegation to Zuma was reportedly Lloyd Hill. At the opening, Hill thanked the president for seeing them and said in Afrikaans: “OK, ouens, hier's julle kans nou. Die ou ballie is 'n naai net soos ons [OK, guys, this is your opportunity. This old fossil is a fucker just like us].

Zuma had been infected by the most noxious disease of politics: greed.

Like most South Africans, I realised that should a man accused of fraud and his henchmen lay their hands on the state's coffers, it would be as fatal as handing an alcoholic the keys to his local Liquor City.

His handlers have built an enormous blockhouse for him, and he almost never strays from its air-locked confines. We only encounter him at the occasional press conference, where we are never allowed to ask follow-up questions, or in Parliament, where he trundles through the proceedings. Think about this for a second: a sophisticated, populous, middle-income nation with a large international profile has no fucking idea what the president thinks, if he thinks anything at all. How did we come to be led by a shadow?

Zuma may have the appearance of a scuzzy ghost, but the war against his wretched, calamitous, inept and divisive rule is far from over. Those who thought that Zuma was down and out have underestimated him. Beware: his middle name is not for nothing Gedleyihlekisa. It means 'the one who laughs while grinding his enemies'.

Poor JZ is the perpetual victim. In the case of Nkandla, he was the victim of a 'supply-chain' fiasco; something he knew nothing about.

To prevail and to enrich himself, Zuma has been prepared to defy the Constitution, risk the economy, jeopardise social grants, allow his cronies to plunder and capture the state, and look on while the law enforcement agencies implode.

In his first five years, Zuma had ripped like a tornado through the state's institutions and wreaked havoc across the land. But the worst was yet to come. In his second term, which has two years left as I write this, the windstorm has been upgraded to tsunami status and Zuma is ravaging the Republic.

The ongoing reports continue to demonstrate years of the most horrendous and systematic looting, stealing, corruption, money laundering and abuse of our state agencies and state-owned enterprises imaginable. Some losses run into billions of rand. Much of it is taxpayers' money – money that could and should have gone to fund needy tertiary students, build more schools and provide more services to disadvantaged communities; money that could have addressed issues that have been fuelling many of the civil protests in our country in recent years.

Why has no one, not the Hawks with their serious commercial crimes unit or the police's crime intelligence unit, ever investigated the shenanigans of this family? The State Security Agency (SSA) has a unit that specialises in organised crime. What have they been doing all these years? Why have the Guptas and their associates been allowed to amass their ill-gotten fortunes with such impunity for so long? Why, now that evidence of this is out in the open, are our law enforcement agencies still sitting on their backsides?

Predictably, a full-scare intelligence and propaganda war has been unleashed in the run-up to the ANC elective conference.

countries are no longer countries, but fiefdoms run by tiny hyper-elites, exclusively for their own benefit”.

Dembe about Reddington: More than anyone I've ever known, he's always been at peace with death. He says death is inevitable. It will come for us all. And that inevitability robs death entirely of its significance. What matters are the things that are not inevitable. The things we create. The things we find. The left we take when everything in our life is leading us right. How we live. I've always loved him for that. For his remarkable refusal to "go quietly into that good night." Cooper: The poem... by Dylan Thomas. Rage, rage Against the dying of the light Dembe: Yes. Imagine. Raymond, a man surrounded by death in so many ways, so passionately committed to embracing life. He could have surrendered a thousand times over and Some End. But instead, he chooses to rage. To rage against the dying of the light. To rage against the bad guys that would do us all harm. Rage to protect those people he loves. To find moments of peace and joy... and fun... ( laughs ) ...even though he knows the light is still dying. To live a most passionate life, knowing it will still lead to the same inevitable end... is perhaps the most deeply moving choice one can make. It is the lesson at the very core of my time with him. You never imagined this is how it would end. But our time with him, our time together, was never about how it ended. It was about the adventure, about life, about Raymond constantly reminding us, showing us, imploring us... to rage. To rage.

The Personhood Amendment, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the calls for abortion providers to face the death penalty - the person she planned to be would care about this mess, would bother to be furious. Too tired to be furious.

At this moment Ro/Miss is taking attendance and doing the bit where she repeats the names of the missing ("Quarles...? Quarles...? Quarles...") in reference to an old movie the daughter hasn't seen.

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was quirky of manslaughter.

Her husband’s hands sit on the wheel at ten and two, a habit that in their courting days shocked the wife: he had played in bands, done drugs, punched his father in the face at age fourteen. Yet he steered - steers - like a grandma.

People tend to be more comfortable with speech and behavior that does what they already expect it to do. Yours doesn't, and I respect that it doesn't.

Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, says the congressman, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.

You can't say it was rape or incest - nobody cares how it got into you.

She wants to stretch her mind wider than "to have one". Wider than "not to have one". To quit shaking her head. To go to the protest in May. To do more than to go to a protest. To be okay with not knowing. [...] To see what is. And to see what is possible.

She wants to stretch her mind wider than 'to have one'. Wider than 'not to have one'. To quit shaking her head. To go to the protest in May. To do more than to go to a protest. To be okay with not knowing. [...] To see what is. And to see what is possible.

You ready for me, Wen?” I called out, watching the Chinese leader’s face drop in surprise. I then walked around the table to shake each of their hands. “Gentlemen! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. How about we see if we can do a deal?” Before anybody could object, I grabbed an empty chair and sat down. Across the table, Wen and Singh remained impassive, while Lula and Zuma looked sheepishly down at the papers in front of them.

She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks.

Why does she even want one? How can she tell her students to reject the myth that their happiness depends on having a mate if she believes the same myth about having a child? Why isn't she glad, as Eivor Minervudottir was glad, to be free?

In South Africa, successive presidents—Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1999, and Jacob Zuma, who took over from Mbeki ten years later—publicly denied the nature of the threat posed by the virus, the latter boasting that a postcoital shower offered protection enough. Matters were made worse by a Soviet disinformation campaign, which planted in a KGB-controlled Indian newspaper the story that AIDS had been deliberately engineered by the United States, and then amplified the lie with bogus research by a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, which was widely cited in newspapers around the world, including the Sunday Express.117

Miss said in class she hoped they understood who was to blame for this rib: the monsters in Congress who passed the Personhood Amendment and the walking lobotomies on the Supreme Court who reversed Roe v. Wade. “Two short years ago,” she said—or, actually, shouted—“abortion was legal in this country, but now we have to resort to throwing ourselves down the stairs.

Every year, 29 000 South Africans die prematurely because of air pollution. This is a national health crisis, but leading government figures like Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma are only concerned with people smoking.

The comparing mind is a despairing mind,

In a room for women whose bodies are broken, Eivør Mínervudottír’s biographer waits her turn.

In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller.

My vadge isn't having a good year

My vadge isn't having a good year

humans like to name these things normal and those things peculiar.