Leadership battles, SA style

The good news: people are mad at Mbeki*. The bad news: they'd rather have someone neck-deep in scandal.

Choice quote: “I don’t care whether he is innocent or not. What matters is that he is being attacked because he is not a yes-man.”

Really? It doesn't matter that he's probably guilty of massive corruption? The idea that government leaders (let's not kid ourselves, Zuma's hardly the only one) are habitually using their positions to scrape every juicy scrap from government coffers, for themselves and their extended families, at enormous cost to the taxpayer and to the detriment of public services - that doesn't bother you? You feel South Africans have enough cash that we can afford to be stolen from?

Well. That's certainly a fresh perspective.

And as for this: “This reminds me of the time when I was charged in the High Court in Pretoria. Everything inside the court was against me — from the police to the top" - you can NOT be serious. Trial one: for crimes against apartheid, perpetrated in the name of the oppressed masses. Trial two: for sordid theft, to put it simply, from those oppressed masses. (They will cease to be oppressed only when they escape their unimaginable poverty, and Aids, and constant deception by their greedy, morally bankrupt socalled leaders.)

Using your struggle credentials to fog up the worrying signs that you yourself are now the oppressor - how dignified.

Grumble grumble grumble. Sometimes I hate reading news from home.
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* Not that having an unpopular president is a good thing. But they should be mad. Just maybe not for this particular reason.