C’mon Msholozi, give us a juicy holiday read

I have not been able to lay my hands on a copy of former president Jacob Zuma's much talked about book.

I was really looking forward to spending the holidays reading what Msholozi has to say about the political drama that has been SA ever since a court judgment in the trial of his then friend Schabir Shaik implicated him in acts of corruption in 2005.

It was disappointing to learn that the publicists were stretching the truth by several miles when they claimed the book to be an autobiography, when in fact it is authored by four people, none of whom is the former president.

But I was still keen to read how our government ended up being outsourced to the Gupta family from his perspective.

We have all read the dozens of books on these subjects, many of them pretty good and politically enlightening. But they are mostly written by outsiders who had little insight into how the Zuma administration worked.

Ordinarily, I would have been among the first people to queue outside the McDonald’s on Grayston Drive in Sandton, waiting for the Jacob Zuma Foundation’s spokesperson to start the “first come, first served” car boot sale last Sunday.

But I was hundreds of kilometres away in the coast on family business and, even though Msholozi calls KwaZulu-Natal “home”, his publicists and book distributors do not seem to have considered that part of the country a perfect place to launch the book.

The often spoken about “Joburg bias” seems to have afflicted even our self-styled anti “WMC” and anti “clever blacks” crusaders. Incredible.

My disappointment at not being among the first to read The Words of a President: Jacob Zuma Speaks didn’t last long as I soon came across another book that gives new insights into how Msholozi’s kitchen cabinet operated.

This one is a real autobiography. It tells the story of Lazarus Zim’s upbringing in Bethlehem, Free State, how he first got involved in business and the journey that took him to countries such as Ghana and Nigeria where he helped SA companies such as M-Net and MTN establish a presence in the years after the fall of apartheid.

Lazarus Zim’s Time and Chance is not, by any stretch, a political book. More than 30 of the 47 chapters are about his life in the private sector. But it cannot be denied that his corporate world often intersected with the world of politics as he tended to operate, as a director and business owner, in industries that were highly regulated.

This allowed him to witness some of our most recent political history from a vantage point.

For years, even long before Zuma ascended to the Union Buildings, Zim was in business partnerships with the Gupta brothers, and was considered a close friend of Ajay Gupta.

Considering that the former president went to great lengths to avoid telling his side of the state capture story in front of the Zondo commission, we should not be expecting an offering similar to Lazarus Zim’s from him any time soon

In the book, he tells the story of the highs and lows of this relationship, what eventually led to their permanent falling out and how that led to him being exorcised from the political and business elites of the time.

There are some great anecdotes, such as the near fiasco of a March 2009 dinner party Zim had organised at his house in honour of Zuma, then a president in waiting.

Zuma arrived two hours late, forcing Zim’s other guests — who included banking and mining executives — to wait in frustration. His security personnel started behaving strangely, making unreasonable demands on the household staff and Zim’s wife.

It turns out that just before he left for the dinner party, Zuma had received an “intelligence report” on a “plot” to have him assassinated at the party. Let me not spoil the story, the details are in the book.

There is also the story of how, after Zim’s fallout with the Gupta brothers, Zuma’s legendary PA Nonhlanhla Majake always went out of her way to avoid having Zim and Ajay bump into each other at the presidential house.

In one instance, at Genadendal, Majake even tried to have Zim’s car moved from a particular parking spot so that Ajay, who was already inside meeting the president, would not see that Zim was around.

From this book, the reader gets to understand how interference by one of Zuma’s communication ministers led to the collapse of a multibillion-rand deal between Telkom and a Korean telecom giants that, some say, would have saved thousands of jobs at the then struggling phone company.

Considering that the former president went to great lengths to avoid telling his side of the state capture story in front of the Zondo commission, we should not be expecting an offering similar to Zim’s from him any time soon.

A pity because, even if he steered clear of the major controversies that engulfed his tenure as president, he would have had fascinating stories to tell — such as almost having to sleep at an airport in Burundi when he couldn’t get a lift back home on a presidential jet.

Or about that night after his first inauguration as president in 2009 when his staff allegedly went into a panic about where he was going to sleep as Mahlamba Ndlopfu was still occupied by the outgoing president, and the presidential guest house down the road apparently had no bed.

Now that would make for a great holiday read.