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
On the World Cup
In the fallout from the 2010 bidding round, the Qataris complained that they were taking the heat for a process that had also rewarded Putin and his kleptocratic regime. Why weren’t the Russians the ones in the firing line? Part of Qatar’s problem was that the Americans, from whom they had effectively stolen the tournament, began shortly afterwards to look into Fifa’s finances. A US Department of Justice inquiry into Warner, which ended up charging him with ‘wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering’, triggered the exposure of a whole raft of dodgy practices, including a proposed payment of $2 million from Fifa’s chairman, Sepp Blatter, to his deputy and anointed successor, Platini, which eventually led to the resignation of both men.
