The Jacob Zuma Tapes

I don't know if I'm the only one who actually thinks that African National Congress President Jacob Zuma is calling a bluff when he claims to have tapes that implicate former Directorate of Special Operations (Scorpions) boss Leonard McCarthy and former president Thabo Mbeki in a political conspiracy to put him in prison and throw away the key. Worse still, that he has evidence that suggests that even Mbeki took a huge bite on the Arms Deal procurement kickbacks. I happen to think that Umsholozi, our beloved president-in-waiting wants the National Prosecutions Authority to say, "wait a minute, we can't prosecute Mbeki and end up exposing our country's security arrangement to the outside world. We can't risk having sensitive information making its way into court and being on the public domain, so let's let Msholozi go".

Yeah, that's an intelligent bluff, something I can try to pull as well. I support oppostion parties' position that 'if Mbeki's paw is found in the cookie jar, let him be charged as well'. True, what does 'without fear or favour' mean when there are perceived holy cows? For an example there's this chap who sits on the ANC National Executive Committee who used to go out with my friend's girlfriend when he was supposed to be happily married with children as old as his floozy. He even tried to hook the floozy some business with another company on whose board of directors he sat. That girlfriend used to be the girlfriend of another member of the provincial executive council (provincial cabinet) who was close to the guy who was also chowing the girl. Two top politicians were chowing the same broad, and the other politician is now dying of an unknown disease. So, right now the girl is my friend by virtue of having been my friend's girlfriend and we meet and chat often and to her as a skank the fact that he fucked such a high profile guy is a non-issue because fucking high-profile guys is what skanks does for a living. So, I was telling my friend that in the event that I get arrested by police for possession of marijuana or any other thing I will use my free telephone call to call him, since I have his mobile number as well to inform him that I have been arrested and when he asks me why I called him I tell him that I have been advised by *****, and when it clicks in his head that she's his ex-skank he will want me out of there before his enemies bail me out and I give them ammunition to bring him down.

You see, that's the game. I might call him while I don't know jerk about his liaisons but just that he once helped this girl to start a business and everything is based on suspicion. But for him knowing what he knows about his relationships, he will flip and want me out of there. James Hadley Chase had a novel titled 'The Guilty Are Afraid'. So, Zuma is trying that with Mbeki; he's actually saying, 'I know what you did last summer, so if you don't want me to spill the beans get me out of here'. He's thinking Mbeki might think he will jeorpadise his legacy and arrange with the NPA to drop the charges under the pretext that he's defending the state while he will be defending himself.

But Zuma's bluff is not calculated. First; Mbeki would have panicked if he was still a sitting president. Right now he doesn't give a shit, he's been defeated and is on the touchlines watching his legacy shredded by johnny-come-lates like Treatment Action Campaign's Zackie Achmat and political analyst and the last thing he needs is to be defended. Mbeki does not want to campaign for his family's ANC and his brainchild Congress of the People, he's a man out to be crucified, and what better death than to die in the hands of your enemies. Zuma's bluff is also not calculated because the National Intelligence Agency could not have tapped the phone of a sitting president without a high court judgment. Such a high court judgment would have needed a high security clearance which means former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils would have known about it and stopped such an order from being granted. So, there's no way Mbeki or former Scorpions head Leonard McCarthy's phones could have been tapped legally.

Best case scenario; Zuma has friends in the NIA who could have done the dirty job for him without a court order, friends like that boy who faxed a Top and Bottom Secret memo to a newspaper last year and the ones who did a good job digging dirt about the skank who accused him of rape. Fine, those are his friends but him producing evidence gathered through covert tapping of phones of the president and Scorpions head would not argur well with citizens who want assurances that there's no political manipulation with the functioning of state organs, that people are not using them for their own propaganda needs like withdrawing Terror Lekota's bodyguards while Blade Nzimande is rumoured to still be keeping them. A question will be asked that 'if Zuma could use the NIA to his advantage while he's not even a mere president of the country, what will he then do when he's got the Agency answering to his executive? Are we not seeing rehearsals for abuse of power from our beloved president-in-waiting'. Okay, best case scenario, he actually used private firms to do the surveillance and gather the intelligence for his lawyer Michael Hulley and the team. Who owns those private firms they might have used? Have they been vetted by the NIA and found to be devoid of goons and bad elements? Does he know that foreign intelligence organisations actually set up private investigation companies as fronts for their covert intelligence gathering that passes off as legitimate crime investigations? Does he know that ABC Private Investigators is a front for the Mossad and every telephone call they bug which is of a senior government person the intelligence is coded and sent to Tel Aviv?

Now you see, Zuma is actually calling a bluff. He doesn't have a fucking tape. Even if he has one or two the people on them are voice artists who are pretending to be Mbeki and McCarthy and not the real characters. That's why he introduced them as part of his presentations and not evidence which would be subject to testing by experts. Maybe I'm the one who's bluffing, but I've been friends of the intelligence community long enough to know that the best Zuma could do is to contest the charges put infront of him, instead o trying to blackmail prosecutors with non-existent evidence of collussion since everybody who has read Andrew Fenstein's book After the Party will tell you that the ANC's 1999 elections were funded on arms deal kickbacks. Which says the whole ANC, including the folks who left to form COPE are all tainted by that blood money.