South Africa: The Bold and the Bothered - Zuma and Vavi Come Out to Play

analysis

Any gathering that manages to draw both President Jacob Zuma and Cosatu general-secretary Zwelinzima Vavi is going to be a blockbuster event. Especially when it features the first public appearance of Zuma's iPad.On Thursday the National Union of Metalworkers of SA held a "political commission". It's a mark of the importance of the union movement that both figures pitched up. Vavi we expected to be worth the price of admission. And he was. But the real star of the show was Zuma. Yes. You read that right.

It's a measure of how much things have changed over the last year that Zuma now has the political space in which to make massively important political statements, openly court the unions and take undisguised pot-shots at the ANC Youth League. Zuma usually only speaks in a directly political way when he is either absolutely furious, or feels so safe that there cannot be any negative consequences for what he says. In this case, it was the latter. And while the iPad was with him, and very much in evidence, his prepared speech was still on dead tree. Not that he stuck to it.

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