Say what you want about Jacob Zuma, but you have to admit he’s not an easy man to poison. I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s claimed someone has poisoned him, or at least attempted to do so. There was the time in 2014, for instance, when there were accusations that his former wife, Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, had poisoned him on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies. The usual suspects were named, if memory serves me. The CIA and MI6, I think, though not Smersh for some reason.
The Mercury reported in 2017 that Zuma told members of the ANC national executive committee that there had been three attempts to poison him. “I was poisoned and almost died just because South Africa joined Brics under my leadership; they said I was going to destroy the country,” he reportedly said. Well, they weren’t that far out on the destroying the country bit, whoever “they” might have been.
And here we are in 2024, and people are still trying to poison the guy. You’d think by now they’d know he’s indestructible. Sunday World reported that “new kid on the block, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, alleges it has unearthed an elaborate plot implicating some of its senior members to poison former president Jacob Zuma ... The bombshell was dropped in the party’s ‘internal intelligence report’, which was sent to the organisation’s interim leadership recently. The nascent party’s interim leadership took the report so seriously that it used some of its contents to expel its founder, Jabulani Khumalo, and four other members.”
I’m not really sure why Sunday World puts the words “internal intelligence report” in inverted commas. To indicate, perhaps unconsciously, that it’s more of a rumour than a report, one imagines. And in fact, if we read on, we discover that this is less investigative journalism and more invented fantasy.
“The plot to poison Zuma and delete him from South Africa’s political landscape was leaked to us after MK Party spokesperson, Nhlamulo Ndhlela, revealed in a television interview that Khumalo and the four members were booted out of the fledgling party, which is ruffling feathers on the political scene, after receiving an intelligence report with damaging information about them. However, despite pressure from newshounds to reveal the report’s contents, Ndhlela declined to do so.”
Newshound, huh. That used to mean an aggressive journalist who puts a lot of effort into unearthing new stories. Now it apparently means someone who conjures up stories from sniffing around piles of ordure. And I don’t mean in the way the dung beetles over at amaBhungane do it.
Still, it’s interesting to think about why there’s yet another story about an attempted poisoning of Zuma. What is it about our beloved ex-president that makes him such an ideal target for poison? According to Sunday World, when asked how the assassination was going to be carried out, a “high-ranking MK Party insider said their members, working in cahoots with senior members of the ANC, are looking to find out who could get the closest to Zuma”.
“‘The poison is in KwaZulu-Natal as we speak,’” he or she said dramatically. Probably he.
And yet another MK Party leader said, somewhat confusingly, “due to the sensitivity of the matter and not to compromise Zuma’s security, ‘we can confirm that the poison was detected in the former president’s food a few weeks ago in one of the hotels in Durban’”. If we are to believe the story, Zuma was warned of the poisoning by intelligence operatives from a neighbouring country, and then employed a private toxicology company to accompany him to some of the MK events.
As you might remember, in 2015 Zuma jetted off to Russia to get treatment for his poisoning, and a few years later recommended to then deputy president David Mabuza that he do the same when he was also supposedly poisoned. And why not? You’d expect the country that’s made poisoning its enemies part of its geopolitical arsenal to know a little about antidotes too.
With so many effective poisoners in the world, it seems miraculous that Zuma has survived so many attempts
Russia has a long history of using poison. As the Financial Times puts it: “There are many ways to incapacitate an enemy. But, historically, few have proved so attractive to the Soviet and Russian security services as poisoning. Ever since Vladimir Lenin set up his poison factory, known as the ‘Special Room’, over a century ago, poisonings have become one of the Kremlin’s preferred ways to eliminate, cripple or terrorise enemies and critics. Over the decades, it has built up unrivalled expertise in the field.”
According to the site Atlas Obscura, the secret poison factory was set up in 1921, not long after an attempted assassination of Lenin “via poison-coated bullets”. And the “Special Room became known, variously, as Laboratory No. 1, Lab X, and Laboratory No. 12 before becoming known simply as the Kamera or ‘the Chamber’ under Joseph Stalin”.
The goal of the chamber, it tells us, “was to devise a poison that was tasteless, odourless, and could not be detected in an autopsy, so as to protect the anonymity of the assassin. This led to such innovations as a cyanide that could be deployed as a mist, a poison that made the cause of death appear to be a heart attack, and a gas pistol that could shoot liquid up to 65 feet away. One politician was killed by a poison sprayed onto his reading lamp, which the heat from the bulb caused to disperse through the room with no trace.”
It all sounds very melodramatic and filmic, but it’s all real. The FT says the Kremlin reputedly had one of the biggest biological and chemical weapons programmes in the world during the time of the Soviet Union, at one point involving “an estimated 25,000 to 32,000 people across more than 20 military and civilian laboratories, plus an additional 10,000 staff at bioweapons laboratories run out of the defence ministry”.
They experimented with different poisons, at times by injecting people under the guise of a routine medical check-up. Early attempts were clumsy, and quickly discarded for use in assassinations when they were too easily detected in autopsies. They switched to less identifiable poisons, which worked in lower doses and mimicked the symptoms of ordinary ailments.
“The horrific details of Russian poisoning attacks have accumulated over decades: the hiding of a ricin pellet inside the tip of an umbrella said to have been used in 1978 to stab the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in the leg, killing him in less than a week. The placing of a radioactive isotope, polonium-210, in the green tea drunk by the former Russian security services agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. The smearing of one Novichok variant, a deadly nerve agent, on the British double agent Sergei Skripal’s door in 2018 and another on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s underpants in a Siberian hotel room in 2020.” Navalny died recently in a Russian prison, in — to put it understatedly — suspicious circumstances.
Russia isn’t the only nation that’s used poison for assassination. In Madeleine G Kalb’s book The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa — From Eisenhower to Kennedy, she writes about a CIA attempt to poison Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s. Apparently, a CIA agent arrived in the country with a poison designed to transmit a fatal indigenous disease, to be injected into Lumumba’s food or toothpaste to kill him.
The problem with being a corrupt politician claiming that other politicians are corrupt is that, even though your supporters will still choose to believe you, hypocrisy inevitably starts to weaken the message
With so many effective poisoners in the world, it seems miraculous that Zuma has survived so many attempts. Perhaps he is similar to Mithridates, the king of Pontus in Asia Minor (120-63 BCE), who was so scared of being poisoned by his enemies that he used to take small amounts of poison daily along with a mixture of antidotes to build up tolerance. He would show off his immunity to poison by inviting dinner guests to sprinkle his food with deadly poisons.
As usual, though, we need to think about what’s behind Zuma’s claims. What benefit does he, or his party, get from painting himself as a target of assassins?
In an article about the Ntuli-Zuma poisoning case, the Daily Maverick writes that “poisoning accusations are a device with which to cast doubt and Zuma has used them with devastating brilliance. He understands that poison draws power from being undetermined, non-specific and mysterious.”
This makes even more sense in 2024. It feels as if the information ecosystem is even more conspiracy-ridden, as if we’re accelerating towards some entropic endpoint in the hyper-unreal world of disinformation we live in now.
The problem with being a corrupt politician claiming that other politicians are corrupt is that, even though your supporters will still choose to believe you, hypocrisy inevitably starts to weaken the message. It’s just not special any more. So the fact that, according to reports, Zuma has accused Khumalo of being an ANC spy, and of spending the money he ostensibly raised on behalf of the MK Party on luxury cars for himself, just isn’t enough of a differentiator. All this really means is that he is a perfect political fit for a party run by President State Capture.
But float rumours of assassination attempts by poison, and there are no awkward parallels to be drawn. And of course, corruption is mostly just personal venality, whereas assassination gives you the opportunity to drag in all manner of straw men to deflect scrutiny and accountability.
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