Nearly 10 years after the September 2008 recall of then-president Thabo Mbeki, the ANC has recalled another sitting president. History will record these events – Mbeki’s 2008 recall and that of Jacob Zuma this week – as a continuum in a chapter of fluctuating pluses and minuses in the national liberation movement’s fitful contention with corruption as one of the centrifugal forces that have shaped much of post-colonial Africa.
However one looks at it, Zuma has been recalled for the same reason for which Mbeki dismissed him from the position of deputy president of the republic in June 2005: his alleged involvement in corruption.
In a cruel twist of irony, it was to shield Zuma from prosecution for his alleged involvement in corruption that the ANC jettisoned Mbeki in 2008; more specifically, to pave the way for the then national director of public prosecutions, Mokotedi Mpshe, to quash Zuma’s corruption charges. The Mbeki presidency was correctly seen as a stumbling block in the realisation of that nefarious outcome……more