The people of South Africa are getting impatient.

Former president Jacob Zuma was a no-show at his corruption trial in the KwaZulu-Natal High Court earlier this week.

His reasons? He’s ill – something that he tried to prove with the world’s most unconvincing sick note. 

Seriously, I’ve seen better attempts from undergraduates trying to get out of turning an essay in on time.

Whether or not Zuma is actually too ill to participate in fixing the mess that he helped to create, remains to be seen.

According to The Citizen, his lawyers, his son, and sources close to the former president all claim that his health is bad. The courts, however, were unconvinced, and a warrant for his arrest was issued.

With all of that hanging in the air, a tweet arrived out of nowhere.

Zuma doesn’t use his Twitter account much, but when he does, it’s always effective.

On Wednesday, he tweeted the following picture:

The image didn’t have a caption, and everyone assumed that it was a recent photo. As many people pointed out on social media, if it is a recent photo, Zuma doesn’t look very sick. In fact, he looks like he’s having a great time.

His son tells a different story:

Edward Zuma, revealed in an eNCA interview on Thursday morning that the picture was taken two years ago. He said he had bought his father the gun to shoot birds.

Okay, pause. Poor birds.

While it might have been an innocent post, I can’t help seeing this as a classic diversionary tactic.

Meanwhile, Edward has expressed his anger with the courts regarding their decision to issue a warrant of arrest for his father.

“It was a decision taken out of hatred for the man, it’s being vindictive, vicious and very much abuse of the judiciary for personal reasons (sic). This they do forgetting that the old wounds have not healed and we are gradually getting tired of them abusing the system. Our patience is running out as we can see what is happening. However, we don’t want to be tested as people,” Edward said.

Yeah, we’ve heard the conspiracy theories before.

Although, ‘spies’, ‘agents’ and so on are usually the domain of Julius Malema.

I’ll leave you with this throwback (Thursday) to a Zapiro cartoon from October last year:

So slow…

[source:citizen]