Where is Zuma’s ‘elephant-sized’ evidence?

Our country will not collapse because of the many practical ills — from crime and corruption to mismanagement and poverty — that beset us.

It will collapse when the lies of our leaders undermine our independent institutions to such an extent that these bodies are delegitimised, distrusted by the people and rendered useless. That is when anarchy will be let loose upon us all.

So why then has Jacob Zuma, the self-appointed president of the MK party, not been charged for spreading the lie, and repeating it many times, that the May 29 elections were rigged, and his votes were stolen?

On June 1, Zuma arrived at the IEC election results centre with a retinue of acolytes and boldly alleged there had been widespread vote-rigging on May 29.

He threatened to take legal action to stop the announcement of the results and said his allegations should be addressed first. He did not produce a shred of evidence to back up his claims.

“Nobody must declare [the results] tomorrow, no. If that happens, people will provoke us because we know what they are doing,” Zuma said.

Three months have passed. He still has not produced any proof. Recently he told his supporters: “The evidence we’ve received is as big as an elephant. It’s a lot.

“Now lawyers have to write all of that down. The case is coming. There is nowhere [across the country] where they didn’t rob us.”

We are still waiting.

Zuma is not the first in his party to spread lies and threaten the IEC. Before the election, his fellow “leaders” threatened IEC officials and South Africans.

They consistently acted to undermine the IEC’s independence and authority, and to rubbish its admirable record of free and fair elections held over the past 30 years.

“If they [the IEC] remove the MKP and President Zuma from the ballot as the face of the campaign and try to take our rights, there won’t be elections in SA,” MK party Youth League leader Bonginkosi Khanyile told supporters before May 29.

So, what’s happening here? What is Zuma trying to achieve with his false and baseless accusations of vote-rigging?

In her essay Truth and Politics, philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”

In essence, Zuma is trying to make us lose our way as a country. He wants us to veer away from the true north that leaders such as Nelson Mandela and others set us on. A lie, spoken once without any consequences, and then repeated many times, starts to undermine the institution at which it is directed even when the utterance is patently untrue. He is sowing doubt in the institution and in our democracy.

Zuma should not be allowed to infect our democracy with his own false facts. The facts are clear: the election was free and fair. Only evidence will make this false.

Zuma has provided no new facts, no evidence, to say this election was rigged.

Zuma’s way has been, in the past, to lie about institutions and then cut them down, leaving himself the winner. That is what he did with the Scorpions unit in the late 2000s.

He used his acolytes at the time to viciously attack it, and deployed intelligence networks to spy on its leaders and leak their conversations, thus laying the ground for the ANC to disband it in 2009.

That is what he did with the National Prosecuting Authority, the SA Revenue Service, the public protector and others. He lied about them repeatedly and then sent his hand-picked yes-men and women in to take them over.

By then, South Africans did not even raise a word in protest. The lie had done its work.

We should not let it happen again. We should not allow Zuma to undermine an institution, spread lies about it and sow doubt about our democracy when there is no truth to any of his allegations.

The man must produce the “elephant-sized” evidence that these elections were rigged and those who committed this crime must be prosecuted for it.

If he cannot produce this evidence, then he must be charged for spreading falsehoods and misinformation about the IEC. By lying he could have sparked protests and even a war.

We cannot continue to allow such lies. The law is the law. It must apply to the IEC as much as it must apply to Zuma. He is not special. He should not be treated in a manner that is in any way different to the rest of us.