Once there’s a crack in the dam, it’s inevitable that the walls will come crashing down soon enough. But what does Jonas and Mentor’s confession of the Gupta’s involvement actually mean for Zuma? S’Thembiso Msomi breaks it down.

In the many scandals that we have been through before regarding our very own Jacob Zuma, he has kind of got off scot-free. But now that his own people, the very ones he relied on heavily to protect him, are turning against him in an effort to uphold the original image of the ANC.

What Jonas did was to confirm what many in the ANC have been saying in private for years: that the country’s sovereignty is under threat from the Gupta family as it has positioned itself as a parallel executive – deciding on who should take what public sector job behind closed doors.

So basically, our country has been run by a family who came to our shores in 1993. Go, us!

Does this weaken Zuma? Definitely.

Does that mean it is the end of his presidency? It depends on whether‚ despite Jonas‚ Vytjie Mentor and Fikile Mbalula’s statements that the Guptas offered them Cabinet positions‚ the ANC still stands by him.

Time will tell when President Zuma meets with his parliamentary MPs today.

Then there is the weekend ANC national executive committee (NEC) meeting. It was the NEC that recalled former president Thabo Mbeki from office in 2008. However‚ at that time Mbeki was no longer the party’s leader, having lost to Zuma a few months earlier.

The party’s leaders in the NEC now have to weigh two questions. Can they afford to remove their president from office with just only a few months to go before the municipal elections? The last time they recalled a head of state‚ the party suffered a split and lost more than a million voters at the polls. But is that risk greater than going to the elections with a compromised head of state who has abdicated his responsibilities and outsourced his constitutional power to appoint members of the Cabinet to his friends and business partners?

I think it might bring some relief to everyone.

[source: timeslive]