22 Quotes by Jacques Pauw

I want to write a book again,” I said to Sam on a blazingly hot afternoon on the veranda of the Red Tin Roof.

I can basically go to prison or at least be prosecuted for what I have revealed to you about the PAN programme investigation. The SSA will argue that I have jeopardised national security and endangered the lives of agents. This is, of course, nonsense. I have not revealed any state secrets and have not endangered any operations that are genuinely in the interest of national security.

The campaign against the SARS “rogue unit” was driven by elements in the SSA ... Suffice it to say for now that the stories in the Sunday Times were bullshit, but they were integral to the destruction of the most effective law enforcement organisation in the country.

A pattern of appointing cronies and loyalists in key positions emerged at the outset of Zuma's presidency. He was mindful that he could still be brought to book for corruption in the future, and set in motion a shadow security state that would undermine the independence of the police and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).

Can you imagine charging one of the most powerful people in the country with treason and those around him with fraud and corruption?

We have become world leaders in income inequality, racial tension, rape and illicit financial outflows.

Zuma vowed at his inauguration: “This is a moment of renewal. I will devote myself to the well-being of the Republic and all of its people.

It is often said that Zuma is proof that anyone, even from the humblest beginnings, can rise to the top. A son of a domestic worker mother and policeman father who died when he was a young boy, Zuma was chiselled from the land north of the Tugela River in KwaZulu-Natal. Called the land of hills, honey and cobras, it is an area tormented by poverty and stands in stark contrast to the rolling sugar estates and “white monopoly capital” on the other side of the Tugela.

Zuma is one of the most lampooned and jeered heads of state in the world and can easily be brushed aside as an uneducated peasant – yet he is in fact a brilliant strategist.