President Zuma was described as South Africa’s biggest sell-out yesterday as he faced a second parliamentary vote of no confidence in a year.
Mr Zuma, who did not turn up to hear the opposition attack, won the vote by 225 votes to 99.
The ruling African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, has stood by the president despite a series of fiascos including a reshuffling of the finance ministry last December that caused the rand to crash. ANC members vowed yesterday to continue to defend him.
Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance party, told MPs that Mr Zuma was not driven by a quest for a more prosperous South Africa. “It has always been about creating a more prosperous Jacob Zuma,” Mr Maimane said. “And here’s the thing: the more prosperous Jacob Zuma becomes, and the more obvious his failures are, the more the ANC plays the race card to deflect legitimate criticism. It cannot be that if you are white and you don’t agree with the ANC you are called a racist and if you are black you are called a sell-out.”
He called on the ruling party to “prove to the nation that the ANC is better than Jacob Zuma. The ANC of today call us sell-outs, but they don’t see that, slowly but surely, the people of South Africa are beginning to realise who the real sell-outs are.”
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Last month Mr Zuma admitted that he had “unduly benefited” from millions of rands in public money spent on several upgrades to his country home, including an amphitheatre, chicken run and swimming pool — which he had previously denied. The Democratic Alliance was working yesterday to reinstate more than 700 corruption charges against Mr Zuma, in a hearing at the High Court in Pretoria.
Lindiwe Zulu, the minister of small business, defended the president in an impassioned speech against what she called a “frivolous motion” by the opposition. She praised his “capacity to learn, to listen, to lead and be led”.