Quote of the week
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you.
The journey is part of the experience — an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.
Zuma’s Mauritian trip revisted
The Mail & Guardian reports that the Mauritian prime minister, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, has denied being asked by Jacob Zuma to “intervene” in the African National Congress (ANC) president’s legal fracas on the Indian Ocean island.
No, he didn’t ask me to assist him in his case. We can’t assist him, even had he asked. He came to see me, to call on me when he was here in Mauritius to say, just to tell me … what he was doing, that he wanted to challenge in court and I explained to him that in Mauritius we have a very independent judiciary, that he has to go through the court system and the courts will decide; nothing more than that.
This seems to suggest that my previous post about Mr Zuma’s trip might have been unfair. But when questioned about what prompted Ramgoolam’s comment to the Financial Times that “we don’t intervene”, his director of communication, Dan Callikan, said that Zuma “evoked his judicial problems” and Ramgoolam explained the Mauritian legal system to him.
So Mr Zuma did “evoke” his legal problems but did not directly ask for help. It is unclear why he would evoke his legal problems with the prime minister unless he was hoping that the prime minister might be of some use for him in this legal dealings. The prime minister obviously understood it that way otherwise he would not have felt the need to explain to Mr Zuma that he could not interfere.
At the very least Mr Zuma raised the legal problems with the prime minister and thus placed the prime minister in the difficult position of having to explain that he could not interfere. This is still inappropriate. If I were to bump into the Rector at a party and “evoke” my application for a promotion, it would be improper of me because I would at least subtly trying to gain an unfair and illegal advantage over others.
So, maybe my initial post was not so unfair to Mr Zuma after all but I am sure the good readers of this Blog will correct me if I am wrong.
