In South Africa, World Cup shares spotlight with president’s family
President Jacob Zuma is once again testing his contention that South Africans make a distinction between political matters and his increasingly complicated private life. As the country prepares to welcome a global audience this week for the start of soccer’s World Cup, the media are filled with allegations and gossip of messy affairs in the presidential family.
The storm this time centers around the polygamous Zuma’s second wife, Nompumelelo Ntuli, who reportedly became pregnant by her bodyguard. The unverified claims are based on an anonymous letter sent to a newspaper, possibly by Ntuli’s rivals within the family.
Some observers say a pregnancy would explain a ceremony in April in which Ntuli reportedly gave a goat to Zuma’s family, a traditional gesture to appease family elders who believed she had been unfaithful to him.
The bodyguard reportedly committed suicide.
Zuma has refused to correct or deny the rumors, instead criticizing what he says is a media obsession with his private life. But the swirl of speculation now centers on whether Zuma’s family issues might spill into public during Friday’s ceremonies to mark the World Cup opening.
Marriage to Ntuli has complicated Zuma’s image. Other local reports say she assaulted a policeman and broke the security gates at the presidential guesthouse when Zuma informed her last December that he was taking a third wife. She’s also been accused of accumulating bills in expensive boutiques that went unpaid for months, and of firing six servants, one of whom was suing for several months of alleged unpaid wages.
The latest reports fan the unease many South Africans feel about their polygamous, womanizing president, whose history of philandering is well-known.
There was widespread public outrage in February with news that Zuma, 67, had fathered a child out of wedlock with Sonono Khoza, 39, a marketing events manager at a bank and the daughter of Irvin Khoza, head of the Premier Soccer League and chairman of the World Cup local organizing committee.
Zuma initially underestimated the furor within his support base of conservative traditionalists over the birth of Khoza’s child. Some days after the scandal broke, he apologized to the nation over the affair.
A phone survey in January by market research company TNS of 2,000 urban South Africans indicated that 74% found polygamy problematic. Eighty percent of black women opposed it.
If more scandals emerge in coming months, it could cost Zuma the leadership, according to analysts. Factions in the ruling African National Congress are struggling over leadership positions — even though the party conference that will decide this is two years away. The divisions have distracted the ruling party and undermined Zuma’s authority, raising doubts about whether he will get a second presidential term.
Zuma has had numerous extramarital affairs. He has married five wives, one who divorced him but sits in his Cabinet, and another who committed suicide in 2000. His messy private life sits uneasily with the country’s modern, liberal constitution, which guarantees equality of the sexes.
It also indicates the unresolved contradictions between traditional or customary law and common law in South Africa. Feminists have criticized the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, which permits men but not women to marry numerous spouses. Some have questioned whether the law contradicts South Africa’s constitutional guarantee of equality for all.
Zuma has been under attack on a number of fronts lately: Critics attacked his ethics after he failed to file an account of his financial interests until after a public scandal forced him to do so.
The tangled web of his family members’ financial interests, most which were acquired after he took over the leadership of the ANC, also raised concern. His conciliatory leadership style has been condemned as weak, with many questioning whether he can heal the rifts in the ANC and move the country forward.
Political analyst Adam Habib of the University of Johannesburg said in an interview that the scandals alarmed the cosmopolitan, middle-class elements in the ANC.
“For them, Zuma is becoming an embarrassment, with the extramarital relations, the polygamy, the crudeness of the conflicts of interests of family members. That bugs the hell out of them,” he said.
In 2006, Zuma was acquitted of raping an HIV-positive woman, the daughter of an old ANC friend of Zuma’s. He said he knew the woman wanted sex because she was wearing a knee-length skirt. He claimed that in Zulu custom it would have been dangerous not to satisfy a sexually aroused woman, because she might cry rape.
City Press columnist Babalwa Shota wrote that many South African women sympathized with Ntuli because of Zuma’s extramarital affairs.
