Johannesburg - As former president Jacob Zuma’s son Duduzane Zuma appeared before the State Capture Commission this week, the inquiry hoped he would shed light on years of looting of state coffers often linked to his father’s association with the controversial Gupta family.
However on Twitter, South Africans were excited about Zuma junior’s appearance before the commission for a totally different reason as they gushed over his good looks.
The popular social media platform was abuzz with women lauding over the well-chiselled Zuma as he appeared before the commission three months after his father made his appearance.
It seemed that important key points that Duduzane was presenting to the commission were of secondary importance to some who were only fixated on his boyish looks. @Refilwe_Phats posted: “I can barely concentrate on what he’s saying. Modimo!!!! (God!!!!)”.
@Blaque_Wido posted: “Mara Duduzane deserves to be under house arrest, my house to be specific”, and also did not let the opportunity to drool over the younger Zuma pass her by as she posted: “#DuduzaneZuma out here looking like the forbidden fruit, but I would gladly swallow. If I die, I die. Woza baba.”
Prada (@Property_LawBae) posted: “Well spoken eye candy. I don’t care what he’s being accused of, he didn't do it because... wow.”
Meanwhile others joked about his proficiency in the English language with @UmalambaneZN tweeting: “Duduzane Zuma makes you realize that knowing English can send you straight to jail.” His smooth English continued to set tongues wagging with Maqhawe (@Gustav_Nd) tweeting: “If I was as articulate in English as #DuduzaneZuma I would never ever shut up. Ngingakhuluma ngize ngicele ujeke wamanzi (I would talk until I ask for a jug of water).”
However, political analyst Lukhona Mnguni warned South Africans against the “exaggerated adulation” of people like Duduzane.
“I can hear Duduzane's admirers shouting 'We are not saying he must not be found guilty, if he has committed a crime'. Yet, lost in these people is the reality that psychopaths like Duduzane feed off even on the smallest of support.
“It makes them drown further in their delusion of grandeur that they have committed nothing wrong, because even the public has turned him into some object of lust that is to be admired. Even if he were to be imprisoned, he would feel no need for remorse as the public feeds his psychopathic beliefs,” Mnguni wrote.
He added that he had often warned some South Africans who had cared to listen that the habit to make light of “our problems” was an act in triviality and that it removed necessary urgency to awaken “our agency to stand up against wrongdoing and seek to build the new and vibrant South Africa we deserve.”
“Some of our problems are fuelled by the jokes we spend time laughing out on them instead of being preoccupied by solutions to be brokered to turn our social order around.
“As a result, the substance (or lack thereof) of Duduzane's testimony before the Zondo Commission is lost in translation and made to vanish as it drowns in the sea of flirtatious madness with a crook and a fixer.
“Again I am aware that to many they mean no harm and it's nice for some to have someone they can admire so openly without risking their intimate partners being jealous and questioning. It's a funny sort of liberation in another space, one I understand,” Mnguni said.
He added: “But as a country, we are indeed going to suffer. Because we have no collective consciousness that binds us on how to build the South Africa we want. Conceptually scattered, we can never find each other on a programme of action, even at a bare minimum. But as the isiXhosa word would go, "qhubekani" (continue), I have had my vent.”