BEFORE  he was elected President of South Africa on April 22, 2009, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma suffered political humiliation and persecution so much so that, four years before he became President, his political career had been written off by many pundits and a greater number of the South African population.

The government of the day had done everything in its powers to dump Zuma into the dustbin of political history, including instigating anti-corruption agencies to institute charges that bordered on money laundering and racketeering stemming from a controversial $5billion 1999 arms deal.

While his travails lasted, Zuma denied all the charges against him and was vehement in his assertion that he was being persecuted for political reasons and the allegations, baseless. Things, however, took a dramatic turn in Zuma’s favour in December 2007 when the African National Congress (ANC) members elected him as their leader instead of President Thabo Mbeki who while painting Zuma with tar had been claiming to be a Mr. Clean.

Born into a family of poor parents, Jacob Zuma attended some level of formal education before moving into trade unionism and politics.

At the age of 17 Zuma was already a member of ANC and enrolled into its military wing. He was convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the Apartheid regime and jailed for 10 years on Robin Island Prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He was in exile in Zimbabwe and later Zambia and was one of the first to return to his native land when the ban on ANC was lifted.

Many believe that it was because of Zuma’s popularity and increasing rising profile as deputy president to Thabo Mbeki that the presidency framed him up and went ahead to sack him from the government in which he was number two in June 2005. By October the same year, Zuma was charged with corruption and with rape December the same year. In April 2006, he was acquitted of the rape charges and by September the corruption charges collapsed for lack of substance.

After his election as ANC leader in December 2007, the government still went ahead to initiate another corruption charges on the same cases that had already been thrown out, all in efforts to discredit him before the people. But in April 2009, prosecutors dropped charges against him while he won election as president two weeks later.

But what in the first place were the underlining factors that ANC delegates remembered on the day of their national convention that made them vote Jacob Zuma as their party leader and presidential flag-bearer instead of Mr. Clean, Thabo Mbeki?

Majority of the delegates voted for Zuma instead of Mbeki because, in spite of his human failings, they remembered that Zuma had been in the trenches with them for years. ANC delegates remembered that Jacob Zuma, like Nelson Mandela, like Walter Sisulu, like Oliver Tambo and like many other veteran freedom fighters, was one of the taproots of their liberation struggle, one of the pillars of ANC.

To majority of ANC delegates, Thabo Mbeki, though an ANC member himself and of course an incumbent president then who was doing all things possible to return to power was an ‘outsider,’ an opportunist whose time of grace had expired. Zuma was their hero. The delegates used that singular moment to tell President Mbeki that there was a limit to opportunism and chance.

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has so many things in common with now President Jacob Zuma. Like Zuma, Atiku fought many wars with the establishment both military regimes that forced him into exile especially during the Sani Abacha junta and civilian dictatorship of former President Olusegun Obasanjo who he had the privilege of working with as deputy.

Obasanjo, like Thabo Mbeki was an outsider in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). He was drafted into the party in order to appease a section of Nigerians because those who brought him into PDP and presidency thought he was a statesman who would help to heal the wounds of the nation then. But we all know better now.

Atiku Abubakar was a founding member of PDP and gave the party impetus when he moved the Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), the political machinery of his political mentor Shehu Musa Yar’Adua into the PDP.

He was one of the strongest financiers of the party. Before the birth of PDP, Atiku was a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and was a presidential aspirant of the party but had to step down for Chief MKO Abiola to emerge SDP presidential candidate and when the military annulled the 1993 election which Abiola was believed to have won, Atiku stood on the part of justice and behind Abiola until his death.

In PDP, even though he was deputy to President Obasanjo, Atiku pitched tent with Joshua Dariye and the people of Plateau State when Obasanjo threw caution in the air and declared State of Emergency in the state following a crisis which Obasanjo himself instigated.

Mr.  BONI IGWE, a journalist,  writes from Abuja.