Jacob Zuma has been called many things these past few years, most of which I can’t recount here as they’re not becoming of a site such as ours. One thing I don’t remember him being called is a miracle, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

The president was speaking at an event for the Jacob Zuma Foundation that saw 19 students headed to Nigeria to further their studies. He used the opportunity to wish them well, then went off on something of a rant. Below from IOL:

…Zuma said if he listened to his critics he would have “that disease white people call stress but I don’t have it because I know better”.

He said South Africans blamed him for everything.

“If a person loses a shoelace in South Africa, they say it is Zuma and I love it,” he said.

“There are people whose business is to say that ‘we cannot have a man who never went to school running a country. We must rubbish him 24/7’.

“No one has ever said it is a miracle for this man to have become president and written a column about it.”

He further suggested that he was made a “laughing stock” because he came from a poor background and had managed to make something of himself.

“They try to make you feel like you are not capable and make you feel like you don’t know what you are doing and (you are) just useless,” he explained.

“It is even more painful when it comes from those who occupy strategic positions in society… those who are given an opportunity to enlighten society but they do the opposite.

“If you come from a poor family… you are automatically placed and labelled according to different social classes.”

Odd that stress is a ‘white people’ thing when so many of our country’s citizens face a daily struggle to put food on the table.

I’m willing to say it’s a miracle that you became president JZ, and even more miraculous that you managed to dupe voters into giving you a second term.

Zuma also said he was planning on writing a book when he retires, one that would contain a number of revelations:

“I will have time to write what black people did to their own son who never went to school, who educated (himself).”

Zuma said he would spill the beans on these people because he knew who they were. Instead of celebrating the “miracle” of a man who did not have formal education leading the country, people ridiculed him, he said.

“No one has said this is a miracle that a man who never went to school can be a president – no one. But I will explain who those people are. I will be just telling a story as I’m telling a story now,” he said.

Let’s just hope he isn’t left in charge of numbering the pages himself.

[source:iol]