What R422 million, pal?

By this stage, Jacob Zuma’s “who, me?” act has really worn thin, but that hasn’t stopped him from adopting his usual stance when confronted with a mountain of evidence showing what a corrupt and criminal leader he was.

In case you missed this one earlier in the week, the Sunday Times revisited the story of Zuma stashing around $30m (about R422m) of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s money at Nkandla.

This time around, the story had confirmation from Eswatini’s King Mswati III that the money had now been moved to his kingdom in five separate tranches, with Ramaphosa and Mswati having met at OR Tambo International Airport last week.

Having initially denied knowledge of the money, Mswati came clean, and then it became a case of how Zuma would respond

Enter his now infamous Twitter account:

Sigh indeed – at this stage you’d like President Ramaphosa to step up the plate and acknowledge that King Mswati has admitted his kingdom has the money, but we won’t hold our breath.

JZ, we know Gaddafi gave you the money back in 2011, and a little look at the timeline of your relationship with the dictator only makes that clearer.

Times LIVE with the timeline below:

A week before Gaddafi’s killing, Zuma made a rather shocking statement that the African Union (AU) would work better without the Libyan leader.

“The African Union will have more time to implement its programmes now, because Colonel Gaddafi spent a lot of time discussing a unity government for Africa that was impossible to implement now,” Zuma said in a speech. “I had arguments with him about it several times. The African Union will work better now without his delaying it and with some members no longer feeling as intimidated by him as they did.”

…A report by the Institute for Security Studies on what happened between SA and Libya during the 2011 uprising noted that it was unprecedented for Pretoria to approve Western military action against a fellow African country – particularly when it was engaged in mediation.

OK, so he was really not a friend of Gaddafi’s at all, but then, for some reason ($$$), he did a complete u-turn:

“Then South Africa appeared to reverse its position by condemning the military coalition bombing Libya – for allegedly distorting the mandate of Resolution 1973 by trying to topple Gaddafi instead of remaining neutral and just protecting civilians,” the ISS report said. Zuma also accused Nato of deliberately thwarting the AU’s peace initiative…

After Zuma travelled to Libya to meet Gaddafi at the end of May 2011, [Mahmoud Jibril, the 2011 head of Libya’s National Transitional Council] says he received a call to meet him at his private flat in Durban. He cut short a visit to China and travelled 22 hours to meet Zuma.

“We discovered a completely different Zuma in Durban. His position had changed radically since our previous meeting. Gaddafi had put pressure on him,” Jibril told the ISS. Zuma apparently insisted that Gaddafi himself should be part of the transitional government…

The best-case scenario was that this was clumsiness on Zuma’s part. The alternative theory, that he acted out of financial interest and greed, is too ghastly to contemplate.

I wonder how the Guptas felt, knowing that Gaddafi also had Zuma dancing like a puppet for some cold, hard cash?