Quote of the week
A few months ago, author William Gumede described Zuma as someone with a narcissistic personality disorder — a set of traits defined by Austrian psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut as “including an exaggerated sense of superiority, a lack of self-awareness about the impact of their behaviour and having a disdain for others, who they devalue to validate their own grandiosity”. These people lack empathy, have a distorted sense of reality and are incapable of seeing anything from anyone else’s perspective. Narcissists like Zuma, Gumede argues, can’t accept responsibility and don’t care if they take down entire countries with them. The events at Nkandla, sadly for Zuma, only reinforced that perspective.
Financial Mail
For a former president in the Nelson Mandela epoch, who repeated parrot-like “a nonracist society”, and who knows how negative comments about “foreigners” can stoke massacres and civil wars (even in his beloved Nigeria), Mbeki’s spit about native whites as “foreigners”, implying they are suitable targets for xenophobic attacks, was racist provocation animated by a malicious spirit acting through a lost soul. Mbeki’s denial of reality — of the very deep roots of white people in SA, whose contributions made him an African president with virtually a private jet to gad about — is, however, mild compared with his fatal denial of a disease that is ravaging his race. His institute would be a conduit for Mbeki denialism, a tragic prospect for other generations and regions. – Meshack Mabogoane in Business Day
