The fall and rise of Jacob Zuma

CNN dedicated quite a few precious minutes to informing its viewers that newly inaugurated South African president Jacob Zuma is a polygamist with three wives. While this matter may be of some human interest in the West, it barely registers on the continent outside newsrooms and certainly pales in comparison with the 64-million rand question surrounding Zuma's ascendancy to the helm of Africa's richest and most promising country: how will Zuma go about delivering on his promise to provide a higher standard of living to the millions of his fellow citizens who wallow in shanty towns fifteen years after the demise of apartheid?Zuma is believed to be a man of his word (for better or for worse). I expect Zuma to move with deliberate haste to fulfil at least some of his promises to the poor, perhaps with an unpleasant doze of vituperative language, probably taking few prisoners in the process. Instead of wasting time speculating about the diplomatic challenges of handling Zuma's wives, one would expect the media to inform the world that the emergence of Zuma may well be the beginning of the impoverishment of the South African people through the pursuit of short-sighted wealth re-distribution programs that may appear to improve living standards in the short term, while slowly suffocating the continent's engine of economic growth.Zuma himself has so far chosen his words very carefully but many of his fanatical supporters have not been nearly as modest. Will Zuma allow the South African economy to grow and gradually alleviate the lot of the poor or will he opt for populist short-cuts? One can easily imagine that some of the radical supporters of the new president will exert enormous pressure on him to swallow thier own prescriptions. And by the way, Zuma does owe them a few favors. South Africa may be about to experience a tempest