At major rallies and campaign events, South African President Jacob Zuma reads his speeches painfully slowly, using a script prepared by his speechwriters, in such a stilted voice that South African comedians have wondered if he receives his speeches in a series of cellphone messages, one word at a time.
If you really want to understand Mr. Zuma's true beliefs, and where he is likely to take South Africa in the next five years after his widely expected re-election victory on Wednesday, don't listen to his dull and cautious prepared speeches. Listen instead to his off-the-cuff meetings with journalists, where he abandons the script.
One such meeting was on Monday in a crowded conference room in a Johannesburg suburb – his last encounter with the media before the national elections. For nearly two hours, Mr. Zuma was given free rein on the biggest questions of the day, prodded by aggressive questioning from domestic and international journalists. It was a revealing and depressing encounter.
What we witnessed was a politician who seemed oblivious to South Africa's biggest issues and scandals: a politician in denial, who scorned any external criticism, who felt that almost any controversy was unfair and unwarranted. It's a worrisome sign for a country that should be Africa's leader.
The 72-year-old president scoffed at the idea that ordinary South Africans might care about the $23-million state-funded upgrade to his private home at Nkandla village. He claimed that only the "very clever people" talked about the Nkandla scandal – apparently implying that the millions of wasted dollars didn't matter to the dumb masses (and that "cleverness" is a bad thing). He insisted that he knew nothing about the upgrade to his own family residence because he was too busy running the country.
In response to other questions, Mr. Zuma was equally imperious. He told the retired archbishop Desmond Tutu to stick to religion and refrain from discussing politics. He defended the use of a police vehicle to distribute the T-shirts of his ruling party, the African National Congress. And he suggested that the police who killed 34 protesters at the Marikana platinum mine were merely trying to be "democratic."
Mr. Zuma matters to the world because South Africa remains one of the continent's most powerful countries and richest economies. It is the only African country in the G20, the only African country in the five-nation BRICS partnership, and one of the few African nations with any pretense of global diplomatic influence. Mr. Zuma's political followers are in control of the African Union's bureaucracy these days, and they have often tried to mediate solutions to Africa's military conflicts, from Libya and Ivory Coast to South Sudan and Congo. For all of those reasons – and for the fate of its own 52 million people – Mr. Zuma's character and beliefs cannot be ignored, and the elections on Wednesday will be important to watch.
But despite his ambition and influence, Mr. Zuma remains a product of the ANC, a former liberation movement that has turned increasingly corrupt as it maintained a tight grip over South Africa for the past 20 years. Its near-monopoly on power, with landslide victories at every election, has bred a kind of arrogance, and an obliviousness to key issues.
Perhaps most disturbing was Mr. Zuma's apparent contempt for the truth. On the controversy over his Nkandla village home, Mr. Zuma made a series of shockingly false claims. He said, for example, that Nkandla was a non-issue because no voter had raised it directly with him on the campaign trail – ignoring the fact that his campaign events have been tightly scripted and controlled, allowing little real dialogue with voters, and ignoring the fact that ordinary voters routinely mention Nkandla whenever they talk to journalists and other politicians.
He suggested that the Nkandla issue didn't matter because nobody had proven his personal corruption or embezzlement – a deliberate twisting of the issue, since the controversy has always been about the waste of state funds, not whether he stole money. He insisted that the $23-million was needed for his personal security, and he gave examples of attacks on his family in the 1990s – ignoring the fact that the controversy is not about his need for security, but about the use of security funds for personal benefits like a swimming pool, a cattle enclosure, an amphitheater and a medical clinic.
Asked about the ANC's use of state resources for political purposes, including the policemen who distributed ANC shirts from a police vehicle, Mr. Zuma ridiculed this as an issue, suggesting that the critics would require him to pay for his own flight when he travelled to the United Nations on state business – a suggestion that nobody has ever made.
Asked about Mr. Tutu, the famed anti-apartheid leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mr. Zuma essentially told him to shut up. He claimed, falsely, that Mr. Tutu was urging South Africans not to vote. And he added: "My understanding is that bishops and pastors are there to pray for those who go wrong, not to enter into political lives."
It was a bizarre claim, since the ANC routinely invites clergymen to many of its political meetings, even letting them pray for the ANC's victory. More disturbingly, it suggested that Mr. Tutu should have stayed in church in the 1980s instead of fighting against apartheid on the streets, as he famously did.
Some observers have suggested that Mr. Zuma might be pushed aside by the ANC after the election, allowing another politician – perhaps the ANC's deputy leader, Cyril Ramaphosa – to replace him. But this seems a faint possibility now. Mr. Zuma told the journalists on Monday that he has every intention of serving his entire second term of five years after his expected victory on Wednesday.