Word: zuma
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...Zuma, in fact, seems most comfortable at his most African, drawing political lessons from folksy tales of his upbringing and, at rallies, dancing in leopard skins and singing the doggedly politically incorrect Zulu anthem "Bring Me My Machine Gun." As Gordin says, he is "South Africa's first real African President." "I am a Zulu," says Zuma, in an echo of his predecessor's famous "I am an African" speech. "I should not be trying to be an American or more British. I must be a Zulu." (See Jacob Zuma's profile in the 2008 TIME...
...Beginning Can he succeed? The problems South Africa faces would challenge even the best- run nation, and South Africa is far from that. State institutions have been hurt by the departure or exclusion of apartheid-era workers and their replacement with officials too often appointed for their political connections. Zuma's aide says the biggest obstacles to success are "corruption and ineptness in the bureaucracy." But reforming the civil service would mean turning on many of those who put him in power. "There is one very bold thing that can be done," says Andrew Feinstein, a dissident former ANC member...
Feinstein also argues that Zuma is wildly inappropriate for the task he has set himself. Feinstein resigned from the ANC in 2001 in protest at his party's open hostility toward his investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms deal. Through his financial adviser, who was jailed in 2005 for fraud, Zuma was one of the beneficiaries of kickbacks worth thousands of dollars. With Mbeki and Zuma slugging it out at the time, the courts and the state prosecutors became their arena, at considerable cost to the judiciary's independence. Prosecutors finally dropped the case in April, two weeks...
Several mid-level regional officials have been suspended for corruption since Zuma came to power. But Zuma has missed other chances to pursue the guilty. In May, Transport Minister S'bu Ndebele was found to have accepted a $125,000 Mercedes from a road-construction group that had more than $50 million in contracts with the department. Though Ndebele handed the car back, along with two cows, Zuma told him he had no need to. In June, an auditor general's report accused 2,000 senior civil servants of rigging contracts worth $75 million to themselves or relatives between...
...even if Zuma were to keep surprising, circumstances are against him. He came to power just as South Africa entered its first recession since the end of apartheid in 1994, cutting tax revenues and spending plans. But his supporters in the labor unions are in no mood to cut Zuma any slack. His first months in power have seen a wave of strikes and riots over pay and poor government. In October, Zuma fired the entire ANC-run authority of the northern township of Sakhile after weeks of violent protests over poor service delivery...