By Lionel Barber. We have been waiting all day for the president. Now the hour is drawing close. The scene is stage-managed for Jacob Zuma. Zuma appears, flanked by ministers and bodyguards. Many salutations follow. Finally, the leader rises. More thunderous applause. But instead of a virtuoso performance, the president complains that he is coming down with flu. He bombards his audience with statistics such as increased state funding for student bursaries, back-up generators and sewage plants.
My day on the campaign trail with Jacob Zuma, aka JZ, is the first leg of a day tour of southern Africa. The trip will take in neighbouring Namibia and Angola, frontline states in the war against apartheid. My broad assignment is to report on the second great struggle, 20 years on from the end of white rule: the transition from the bush to government and the heavy expectations which come with black majority rule.
We set off from Johannesburg in driving rain, just before dawn. Our destination is Mafikeng, roughly km to the northwest. Back in , at the height of the Boer war, Colonel Bryan Mahon led a 1,strong British column to relieve the town, which was surrounded by Afrikaner insurgents. It was here, in the sandy outpost of the Cape Colony on the edge of the Kalahari, that Colonel Robert Baden-Powell later, founder of the Boy Scouts made himself the symbol of British pluck and endurance, as Thomas Pakenham describes in his magisterial book, The Scramble for Africa.
Today, our mission is to nail down an interview with Zuma, the engaging, raffish president. Zuma is the great survivor. He has overcome criticism of his polygamy, rape charges he was acquitted and a still unresolved arms corruption case. Later in my trip, an ANC veteran tells me over dinner about the time he was dispatched undercover from Mozambique to South Africa :.
Mafikeng is solid ANC territory. The presidential motorcade arrives, more than an hour late. Zuma, a short, tubby, bald figure with an infectious laugh, steps out of his black BMW estate licence plate WMD , poses briefly for pictures and retires for ANC consultations.
