When you’re the president you’re always a sitting duck – you can’t please everyone all the time, and those who you don’t will always have nasty things to say about you.

So what if you remove emotion – remove the fact that JZ has laughed in our faces in Parliament, built himself a castle at the expense of those he ostensible serves and hasn’t grasped the concept of reading large numbers – do we then see a different picture painted?

RW Johnson is a respected political scientist and journalist who is sometimes published on Politics Web. His latest piece titled ‘Slip, sliding away’ seeks to imagine how a credit-rating agency would react to the last few weeks in this country, using that as a basis to point to larger problems.

We’ll focus on the sections where he touches on the #FeesMustFall protests and the government’s subsequent reaction as a springboard. On this front RW Johnson’s anger stems from Minister for Higher Education Blade Nzimande’s first announcement of a 6% cap on fees increase, setting in motion a series of blunders:

This was in blatant disregard of the law which says it is the university councils, not the Minister, who sets fees. This was surpassed only by the President who then announced a 0% increase. Zuma clearly believes that a Zulu chief can just decide the law by personal fiat. The rule of law counted for nothing. No vice chancellor objected. Not one of them stood up for the rule of law.

This was already quite fantastical but it now emerged that neither the President nor the Minister had the slightest idea as to where the money was coming for to pay for the 0% increase, the cost of which was variously estimated at between R2.7 and R4.2 billion. So a committee was set up to work that out consisting of representatives of the students, the vice chancellors and the Ministry. This was ludicrous: none of them could possibly know how to re-arrange the nation’s finances. This will obviously have to be done by the Treasury.

As an analyst what you couldn’t help notice was that every rule of rational or even merely legal decision-making had been broken. Everything was up for grabs and the only real rule was that the government could not withstand determined pressure from any direction…it gave in to the students with no idea where the money was coming from…

The government appears to be punch-drunk. Any well organized group that pushes hard enough will get what it wants. The rule of law is no barrier. The relevant Minister and the President will give way, leaving only [Nhlanhla Nene, South Africa’s finance minister] to block the way.

So how come Nene has been set up to fail? The stunning answer – too simple to be believed by many – is just that Zuma and his gang so little understood the economy that they had no idea what they were doing…

The damning indictment of our government can be read in full HERE, RW Johnson not pulling any punches with this one.

It isn’t easy being president of South Africa, it’s even more difficult when you have no idea what’s cracking.

Thanks, dad

[source:politicsweb]