Word: zuma
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...South Africa Zuma's Path to Power Cleared South African prosecutors have dropped corruption charges against African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma, ending an eight-year legal saga in which Zuma was accused of accepting bribes to impede an investigation into a multibillion-dollar arms deal. The decision to drop the charges comes just two weeks before the country's presidential election, clearing the way for a near certain victory for Zuma. Members of the Democratic Alliance, South Africa's main opposition party, are demanding a judicial review, accusing prosecutors of "buckling to political pressure." Zuma, who had long called...
...many, the ANC's new leader, Jacob Zuma, embodies the party's decay. He won the leadership in late 2007 after a vicious fight with predecessor Thabo Mbeki that split the party - and led to COPE's formation. In 2005 his business adviser, Shabir Shaik, was sentenced to 15 years for soliciting bribes for him, and for years Zuma has faced a related prosecution for corruption, racketeering, fraud, money-laundering and tax evasion. Last month, Shaik secured an early release because of hypertension. On April 6, after three years of trying to bring Zuma to court, the National Prosecuting Authority...
...Zuma's supporters insist he is just the man to fight for the interests of those left behind in South Africa's first years of freedom. Still, there are questions over Zuma's commitment to racial reconciliation - famously, in a country still wracked by racial violence, he chose the Zulu war anthem, "Bring Me My Machine Gun" as a theme song - and about his competence and judgment. He refuses to answer questions on policy, deferring instead to the ANC's executive committee. His coyness may be wise: those opinions he has aired have been startling. On trial for rape...
...Zimbabwe, the party's critics see the same bad underlying dynamics at work. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP who resigned in 2001 in protest at the way his party was frustrating an investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms agreement (the same deal from which Zuma was alleged to have benefited), says the last few years have seen a "regression in Africa's proudest democracy that seeps into some of those stereotypes of African Big Men." Raymond Suttner, a former ANC activist who was detained from 1975-1983, talks of how once in power the party let "ambition...
...Granting the ANC a hefty majority - it won 66% of the vote in the last general election - obviated its need to perform: instead of focusing outwards on improving the living standards of the country, it focused inwards on improving its own. That hasn't gone unnoticed, and notwithstanding Zuma's populist appeal, may now be punished. "They're crooks," declares Lucky Maqutu, 33, an unemployed construction foreman in Mthatha and a volunteer at St. John's Apostolic Faith Mission Church. "Come election day, the ANC better watch out. They're in for a shock...