Word: anc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Zuma, on the other hand, was a low-ranking guerrilla in the ANC's armed wing who rose to the leadership of its ruthless intelligence unit. He plotted bomb attacks and assassinations and ordered the killing of suspected traitors. There was nothing intellectual about such work. In an interview with TIME in early 2007, Zuma summarized his revolutionary ideology in one short sentence: "I was oppressed." Not for Zuma the intellectual contortions that led even Mandela to cast crime as a white, counterrevolutionary plot or Mbeki to see AIDS as a Western drug-company conspiracy. Not for him either...
...Zuma's aide says the biggest obstacles to success are "corruption and ineptness in the bureaucracy." But reforming the civil service would mean turning on many of those who put him in power. "There is one very bold thing that can be done," says Andrew Feinstein, a dissident former ANC member. "That's saying: 'No more jobs for pals. It's jobs for those who can actually do them.' And there is no evidence to suggest that Zuma is going to do that...
Feinstein also argues that Zuma is wildly inappropriate for the task he has set himself. Feinstein resigned from the ANC in 2001 in protest at his party's open hostility toward his investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms deal. Through his financial adviser, who was jailed in 2005 for fraud, Zuma was one of the beneficiaries of kickbacks worth thousands of dollars. With Mbeki and Zuma slugging it out at the time, the courts and the state prosecutors became their arena, at considerable cost to the judiciary's independence. Prosecutors finally dropped the case in April, two weeks...
...apartheid in 1994, cutting tax revenues and spending plans. But his supporters in the labor unions are in no mood to cut Zuma any slack. His first months in power have seen a wave of strikes and riots over pay and poor government. In October, Zuma fired the entire ANC-run authority of the northern township of Sakhile after weeks of violent protests over poor service delivery...
...recurring annual phenomenon. But he is not complacent. "[The protests] say to the government that we had better move," he says. "It's a wake-up call. 'Deal with this! Pay serious attention!' If we do not deal with these things now, people will lose confidence in the ANC." That is the promise of Jacob Zuma. That after half a century in which so many of Africa's independence hopes soured into arrogant dictatorships, the new leader of its proudest democracy accepts that if he wants the job, he's got to earn...