“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” And so begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which serves as a meditation on love, money, and status, and the heartbreak that attends the intersection of all three. (If you’re rushed for time, there are about 67 TV and movie adaptations to chose from.)

An opposite, but no less universally acknowledged, truth applies to polygamy: a man in possession of many wives must be in want of a good fortune. Politics is always personal, and President Jacob Zuma has made a fine art of that arrangement. The longer his tenure drags on, the more his subjects learn that it is all an elaborate scam in service of possessing not the wives so much, but all the status, money and – who knows? – the love that comes with being the Biggest Man of them all.

The chauvinist male id may have found its perfect political expression in Donald J. Trump, and his ascension has certainly proved a giant leap forward for white supremacist sex molesters. Was anyone in South Africa “surprised” by the US election outcome? I seriously hope not, because we’ve been dealing with something similar, if not quite as appalling, since 2007. Sex, power, hate, politics: we know how this stuff works. Zuma, however, is not “self-financed” a la Trump. And in his attempts to set himself up for retirement, the president’s world long ago became a Jane Austen-ish multi-plotline compendium of tragi-comic pratfalls en route to a bittersweet climax.

In our case, the climax will be far less sweet than bitter.

For one thing, over the past year, there has been a definitive and measurable tightening of the security mouth-breathers that surround Zuma during his township tours and his stadium marches. These men, with their stern faces, squawking earpieces and brandished R4s, are looking in the wrong place for the wrong people: it’s members of Zuma’s own family who seem to want him dead. The president’s least favourite wife, Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, was last year banished from the Nkandla homestead for reasons unknown. She has now been identified as a suspect in a plot to poison her husband, and she is under the scrutiny of no one less than National Director of Public Prosecutions, Shaun Abrahams, who we now know would literally chew off his own hand in service of Number One.

MaNtuli’s nefarious activities were allegedly under way back in June 2014, and here’s the interesting thing: I had the pleasure of being around Zuma a lot in the first half of that year, largely because he was campaigning in the general elections, and I was taking notes while he did so. The dude looked properly unwell. “Is he dying?” asked Ranjeni Munusamy, as we sat together at the Independent Electoral Commission during his May 16 victory speech. Indeed, Zuma looked as grey and wrinkled as a exsanguinated tortoise, and it did seem as if the end was nigh. But MaNtuli proved to be as a shitty a poisoner as her husband is a leader, and here we are: on the cusp of another insane chapter of the Zuma presidency.

An unhappy marriage is one thing. But your spouse literally trying to kill you? Ah, this is the sort of plotline that is bound to unfold in a gangster state: when members of your extensive patronage network fail to get what they want, they will inevitably become upset, regardless of how unreasonable their demands may be. Just how upset depends on their appetites and temperament – but more important, it depends on the patience of their own network of dependents. The wider this series of covalent relationships extends, the more people start dying.

We’re just about there, South Africa.

In MaNtuli’s case, the poisoning could just be an old-school retaliation for the strange death of her bodyguard (and alleged lover), Phinda Thomo, which was dubbed a suicide, but… But this is how the gangster state works. Countless moving parts, lots of loose ends, the domestic intersecting with the geopolitical like hadedas necking on jacaranda bough.

* * *

Let’s now toggle to an exchange between the former Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, and Commander-in-Chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, on the occasion of her interviewing him for the recently released State of Capture report. Famously, the report investigates the link between the president and his primary benefactors, the Gupta family. Already, State of Capture has claimed one scalp – that of the thoroughly disgraced former head of our national power utility. Brian Molefe’s fall has enraged the president, and so it should – because this pliant and money-struck groveller was willing to hammer through the preposterously expensive nuclear power package, and was almost certainly going to be Zuma’s next pick for Finance Minister.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As related in the City Press on Sunday, Malema explained to Madonsela how, during coalition talks between members of the ANC and the EFF following the 2016 municipal elections, ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe begged the red berets to make axing the nuclear deal part of their condition package. “And we asked him: ‘Why should we put nuclear?’ And he said: ‘The nuclear deal is going to collapse the country,’” claimed Malema.

Okay, so you see what’s happening here? The deal for eight stupid nuclear reactors, which will deliver an unnecessary 9,600 megawatts of power that will cost the South African consumer at least R1.7/per kilowatt-hour (while blended energy comes in at less than R1) has been negotiated with a Russian state-run company, and will cost the fiscus in the region of one trillion rand – but in reality even more that. Much more than that. That no nuclear project has ever been built on time or on budget doesn’t seem to slow Zuma’s eagerness to get the deal done. Why may that be, you wonder? Why is he under so much pressure to jam this crap through?

“You cannot be under pressure if you did not take people’s money,” said Malema. “You can just tell them that it is not working. Because the reality of the situation is that nuclear is going to cost us trillions.” And even a tiny, tiny percentage of trillions is calculated in the hundreds of millions. Voila – payday!

In other words, Malema has claimed under oath that it is likely that the president and his retinue have already been paid a commission for approving the passage of the deal, and a bunch of Russian toughs are perhaps starting to make the elaborate prison tattoos on the cords in their neck dance in frustration. It’s another version of the MaNtuli debacle, although this time, the poison will be a big polonium sandwich, and Zuma won’t resemble a exsanguinated tortoise for very long.

If we consider the president’s situation for what it clearly is – an existential crisis – then we can now understand why last week he issued so rageful a statement against the former Public Protector. He was particularly incensed at what has been described as a “leak” of the four-hour interview he gave to Madonsela during the investigation – a seemingly endless attempt by the president to waffle his way out of saying anything meaningful, and thus gets immediately added to the vast pantheon of Stupid Stuff Zuma Said.

“[Madonsela’s] conduct has serious implications with regards to ethics, confidentiality and the protection of information gathered during investigations by the Office of the Public Protector,” whined the Prez. But the PP’s office was well within its legal rights to release the tapes, and the transcript of the interview was anyway already attached to the report as an appendix.

“The President urges all parties to act as guided by the Constitution and respect the processes that are unfolding in respect of the Report,” bleated the statement.

Zuma lecturing anyone on “ethics”, or urging anyone to be “guided by the Constitution”, represents something of a seismic bump in his personal bullshit Geiger counter. This may be the post-factual era, but c’mon. As the Gupta trolls attempt to curate an alternate reality for us, Zuma is asking the former Public Protector to behave “ethically”?

But what are ethics in South Africa, circa 2016? Zuma has so debased the notion of ethical, honest governance, that someone like Thuli Madonsela is elevated to the status of a secular god simply for doing her job. (In the case of State of Capture, for doing it not so well, under time and cost pressures.) Into the vacuum djinns and devils stream in, many marked with Russian prison tattoos. In the world that Zuma has built, in which his wife is alleged to have attempted to kill him, and members of our gangster state make secret nuclear deals with members of another gangster state, there is no space for ethics. And there is, of course, no space for the Constitution.

Now, we lurch towards several new crises, including the National Prosecuting Authority’s re-upped charges against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, and the governing party’s attempts to shut down the compulsory judicial commission of review mandated by the PP to parse State of Capture report. All of this will besmirch the president’s reputation even further.

But Zuma has been anticipating all of this. His world is post-fact, which means it is post shame, which means it is post-consequences – nothing is governing his impulses. He has the entire security cluster on speed dial, and they’re itching for a fight. Want an example? Last week, after Zuma made an unprecedented visit to the parliamentary caucus meeting preceding the Democratic Alliance’s proposed “no confidence” vote, where his surrogates made very clear to recalcitrant members of the ruling party that they were to vote for in support president. Giving that the president can no longer trust his chief whip, security hacks infested the parliamentary precinct in order to keep watch over members of Zuma’s own party.

I’ll assume that Jane Austen would have acknowledged the following as a universal truth: a man in possession of a private army is bound to use it. So many fingers, so many triggers. The pulling thereof is nearly upon us, if it hasn’t begun already. DM

Photo: Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa attends a Millenium Development Goals meeting during the general debate of the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York, New York, USA, 25 September 2013. EPA/PETER FOLEY