Thousands gather as ex-deputy Zuma's trial starts in South Africa

[Jahness]

Thousands gather as ex-deputy Zuma's trial starts in South Africa

by Abhik Kumar Chanda

Hundreds of chanting supporters of sacked South African ex-deputy president Jacob Zuma gathered outside a court where the politician faced a make-or-break corruption case that could end his career and presidential aspirations.

The group gathered near the high court in the eastern provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg, with a band playing songs in Zuma's support ahead of one of post-apartheid South Africa's most politically-laden trials.

Zuma's lawyers were Monday due to oppose a move by the State to defer until next year the trial over a multi-billion-dollar 1999 government arms deal in which he was accused of taking money from a local subsidiary of French arms firm Thales.

The popular Zulu politician and veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, who was sacked by President Thabo Mbeki last year after his financial advisor Schabir Shaik was sentenced to 15 years in jail, faces two graft charges.

Zuma, 64, is accused of complicity in accepting a bribe through Shaik to protect the Thales subsidiary from a subsequent State investigation into alleged irregularities.

His supporters however, who held an all-night vigil in his support overnight Sunday, called upon the court to drop the charges.

"I have been waiting here all night for my eminent leader to arrive," said Bongani Saragee, as the band struck up a song called "Leave Jacob Zuma alone" in Zulu.

"We want all allegations against him to be discharged once and for all. Zuma is my president," Saragee, a 34-year-old male nurse, told AFP.

Around him supporters dressed in T-shirts saying "Justice delayed is justice denied" and "Jacob Zuma for president" enthusiastically sang along with the band, who were dressed in military fatigues.

Phumzile Nkabinde, 23, told AFP that "Jacob Zuma is everybody's friend -- he did not do anything. We are doing this (protest) because they don't want him to be president."

National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Makhosini Nkosi said outside court that the State's request for a postponement was "not a matter of dilly-dallying, or a matter of dragging our feet".

"It's a matter of being unable to proceed for reasons that are going to be spoken to in court," he told SABC radio news.

The case has thrown up apparent divisions in the now-ruling African National Congress, the continent's oldest liberation movement, with Zuma alleging that he is the victim of a conspiracy to bar him from succeeding Mbeki in 2009.

Once considered an obvious candidate for the presidency when Mbeki's second and final term expires, Zuma's fortunes plummetted with the graft charges, which were then followed by a sensational rape accusation by an HIV-positive woman.

Although Zuma was in May acquitted of raping the young AIDS activist -- the daughter of a comrade in the apartheid struggle -- his image took a beating when he admitted to having consensual unprotected sex with her.

His statement that he took a shower to minimise the risk of contracting AIDS raised a furore in a country with one of the world's heaviest caseloads of the disease.

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