Dirk Hartford: Duduzile's fall exposes Zuma’s shadow war on South Africa

Key topics:When even the MK party casts out one of its own, it’s not for corruption — but for getting too close to the plan.Zuma’s legacy lives underground: intelligence networks, militarised fantasies and a cartel mindset poised to seize power by other means.The real threat is not in Duduzile's tweets — but in the trained men she sent to Russia and the chaos her father still commands in silence..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Dirk Hartford.Duduzile Zuma Sambudla's resignation as an MK member of parliament is significant because it highlights the extent, depth, and especially the dangers of the swamp of corruption and criminality that South Africa has become.She has been forced to resign from her parliamentary role as the effective chief rep of the Zuma family cartel in parliament by the MK party itself.An MK party, which proudly boasts all manner of corruption-implicated individuals (Molefe, Gama, Montana and Manyi) and miscreants (Hlope, Mngxitama) in its parliamentary ranks, is hanging Duduzile out to dry.Not because she is on trial for incitement to violence and terrorism. But because she organised less than 20 men, several of whom were Zuma family members, to undergo military training in Russia.Duduzile is many things, but she's Daddy's girl most of all. Unlike her brother Duduzane, who learnt a lot with the Gupta's and has a vision, she is not by nature political. She’s a Sandton kugel armed with a cell phone and a substantial social media following, a big playa in the Jozi "it scene" basically, who ended up back with Daddy in Nkandla five years ago..Read more: .FT: Duduzile Zuma, the “princess” poised to run SA’s most divisive dynasty.Her politics, insofar as she has any, were thrust on her by her proximity to and close relationship with her father. She is a Marie Antoinette-type figure, unable to speak Zulu but able to play a key role in inciting the Zulu masses in the anarchic uprising of July 2021 in KZN.One must take nothing for granted when it comes to Zuma. He is the leader of the main opposition MK party, which still controls at least 15% of voter support, according to recent polls, despite the chaotic developments within its leadership corps.The MK party and Zuma himself remain the real tricksters in SA politics. Zuma is a man steeped in the paranoid "intelligence" mindset and he has shown time and again that he knows how to use it.He played a leading role in ANC intelligence from his exile days and utilised it to good effect, ultimately returning from being fired by Mbeki as Deputy President to replace him as President of the ANC and the country.He continued throughout the state capture years of his Presidency of the country to run illegal parallel intelligence structures under the likes of Richard Mdluli, which have wreaked havoc in the country's police and intelligence services, and no doubt the army as well.Havoc is now beginning to be exposed in the Madlanga Commission of Enquiry, even though the nexus between organised crime, corrupt security forces and the Zuma cartel is still by no means clear.What should be in no doubt, though, is that Zuma, and through him the likes of Duduzile, the MK party itself, and Zuma sympathisers still in the ANC, remain serious players in the crisis afflicting law and order in South Africa.Against this background, one can only imagine what the 20 or so "bodyguards" were recruited for by Duduzile and under whose instructions she was operating.The key inspiration for the ANC's turn to armed struggle in the sixties, with the formation of the original Umkhonto weSizwe, was undoubtedly the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro.Castro led a band of a mere 135 well-trained soldier-revolutionaries to seize power. Activists fleeing South Africa to join the "people's army" in exile were inculcated with exactly the same vision as to how, through the armed struggle, they were going to liberate apartheid South Africa.Zuma himself played a leading role in the Umkhonto weSizwe high command in promoting and attempting to carry out this vision at the time.Is there any reason to believe that similar visions are not being advocated, at least clandestinely and in the underground, by members of the High Command of MK now?Why else the military fatigues and the military posturing of MK cadres? Why else send selected cadres to Russia for military training?There are many ways to get to political power, and the ballot box is only one of them. The July 2021 uprising was another.Although it did not succeed, it showed there was way more to it than Duduzile and her hate-filled tweets. There was meticulous planning and execution by sophisticated, trained operatives against multiple key targets amidst all the chaos. There was a police force and army too dumbfounded to act with any efficacy to contain the rioters..Read more: .How the Zuma family operates: Signature forgery and secret deals in MK Party.There was widespread support for and sympathy with Zuma, although his actual fingerprints were nowhere to be found. Four years later, and with what we are seeing being revealed in the Madlanga commission about the actual state of the leadership of our security and intelligence forces, anyone still inspired by a Castro-esque type vision of revolution could be forgiven for thinking that conditions are rotten and ripe for another shot at power.What is missing in this scenario is a small body of highly trained, armed men capable of seizing power.

Dirk Hartford: Duduzile's fall exposes Zuma’s shadow war on South Africa

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