By Stephen Robinson, Daily Mail
Last Updated at 4:22 PM on 02nd March 2010
 Buffoon: Jacob Zuma with one of his four wives |
Spare a thought for the Buckingham Palace protocol officials tomorrow when His Excellency President Jacob Zuma arrives in London for his first state visit to these shores.Read more »
For this incoming 'One hundred per cent Zulu Boy', as the South African President styles himself when he has an election to win, presents unique challenges of planning for the courtiers.
The formal announcement of the state visit primly notes that the President will be accompanied during his three-day stay at Buckingham Palace by 'his wife Mrs Thobeka Madiba Zuma'. This is not untrue - but nor is it quite the whole truth.
Because Thobeka is just one of Mr Zuma's four living wives, not including one from Mozambique who committed suicide in 2000. She is also one of the estimated ten women with whom the libidinous Zuma has sired the 20 children he acknowledges to be his own.
On top of that, Zuma has paid lobolo - a sort of tribal deposit on a future bride - to the families of at least two more potential wives.
On a recent visit to South Africa, I was told very confidently by a man who knows the inner workings of the government that Zuma's true tally is actually 35 children, including a set of twins with a woman from Ukraine.
One thing is clear. Jacob Zuma could not be more different from the man in whose long shadow he must walk - South Africa's great and first democratic leader, Nelson Mandela.
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