A TOP South African trade union leader today warned workers not to be “fooled again” by the country’s former president Jacob Zuma.

The opinion piece by Zwelinzima Vavi in today’s Daily Maverick newspaper follows Saturday’s celebrations to mark the 30 years since the end of the racist apartheid regime and comes as South Africa gears up for elections on May 29.

Mr Vavi, general secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions, said there was an attempt by Mr Zuma “to rewrite history” and to present the then former president as “a victim of the judiciary.”

Mr Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in jail after being found guilty of contempt for defying its order to appear at an inquiry into corruption while he was president.

The former president ditched the governing African National Congress (ANC) and formed his new party, Spear of the Nation (named after the ANC’s now defunct paramilitary wing), to contest the general election.

Mr Vavi said: “There is an attempt to promote him as a peacemaker, someone who can unite and speak to the needs of the marginalised. Someone whose versatility enables him to embrace tradition but who can take us on a modern development path.”

He said: “This is fake news of the highest order.”

The ANC has been hit by accusations of corruption and its inability to effectively tackle poverty, crime, inequality and unemployment, which remain staggeringly high.

The official unemployment rate in South Africa is 32 per cent, the highest in the world. 

Mr Vavi said: “We thought we were on the cusp of radical change. We thought a new dawn was about to break. We were profoundly wrong. 

“We were not wrong to mobilise against privatisation and neoliberalism or to agitate for the removal of those persons who would divert and dilute the Reconstruction and Development Programme and ignore the economic demands of the Freedom Charter.

But, he said: “It was a serious and tragic error for the working class to rally behind Zuma in 2005 and beyond.”

Mr Vavi slammed Mr Zuma as a “former member of the South African Communist Party central committee, who can conveniently quote Karl Marx when he needs to, but is not himself a Marxist or any form of socialist we recognise.”

Without recommending who voters should support in May’s election, Mr Vavi wrote “only the working class is central to the resolution of the capitalist crisis.”

He said: “We must redouble our efforts to build a working-class movement that will not be distracted by the empty promises of dishonest politicians.”