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Cape Town — A crestfallen President Jacob Zuma has bemoaned unfair criticism directed at him for being uneducated, but not all the criticism levelled against him can be regarded as unfair, according to an ANC ally, the SA Communist Party. On Friday, Zuma spoke of his pain at being treated unfairly by critics who cannot “believe that a man who never went to school is the president and that is the reason why he must be attacked 24/7”.

Zuma said he would spill the beans on these people because he knew who they were. Instead of celebrating the “miracle” of a man who did not have formal education leading the country, people ridiculed him, he said.

Speaking at the Jacob Zuma Foundation, where he was bidding farewell to 19 students going to study in Nigeria, Zuma said if he listened to his critics he would have “that disease white people call stress but I don’t have it because I know better”.

He said South Africans blamed him for everything. “If a person loses a shoelace in South Africa, they say it’s Zuma and I love it,” he said. “There are people whose business is to say that ‘we can’t have a man who never went to school running a country. We must rubbish him 24/7’.

“No one has ever said it’s a miracle for this man to have become president and written a column about it.” He further suggested that he was made a “laughing stock” because he came from a poor background and had managed to make something of himself.

“They try to make you feel like you’re not capable and make you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing and (you’re) just useless,” he explained.

“It’s even more painful when it comes from those who occupy strategic positions in society… those who are given an opportunity to enlighten society but they do the opposite. If you come from a poor family . . . you’re automatically placed and labelled according to different social classes.”

SACP spokesman Alex Mashilo said yesterday it was unreasonable to lump all criticisms against Zuma into one category. Mashilo said there had been unfair criticism such as the ones Zuma was referring to.

“It’s unfair, even in both our law and democracy, to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of academic qualifications,” he said. “We’ve fought against such discriminatory practices against the liberals, who wanted the so-called qualified franchise.

“Our democracy belongs to all who have the right to take part in it, not only those who come from school.”

Mashilo, however, said another category of criticism of Zuma, where he had to change his own decisions, could not be regarded as unfair. Last month, Zuma came under fire after he sacked then-finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, replacing him with little-known MP Des van Rooyen, who is now the minister of co-operative governance and traditional affairs.

The decision was later changed by the president, who reappointed Pravin Gordhan to the Treasury. — The Sunday Independent