Is Jacob Zuma talking himself out of a job?

Is Jacob Zuma talking himself out of a job? One would think so, given the increasingly bizarre nature of his public statements.

His off-the-cuff, almost stream-of-consciousness declarations are becoming more and more reactionary, even right wing, and are not what we would expect from a seasoned, canny, wise politician who is the most senior representative of a party that is supposed to represent the revolutionary socialist tradition in South Africa.

The ANC needs to answer the question: is what your president is telling crowds around the country party policy as adopted at Polokwane or simply the random thoughts of a rural fundamentalist?

It began with him saying that delinquent school children who dropped out should be educated by force. "If a child does not go to school, he must be taught by force until he gets a degree. We return him to his parents as a person who has been developed," he told a meeting in Gugulethu. He told an earlier audience in Soweto that kids found on the streets during school hours should be "caught" and sent to colleges far from their homes.

Then he lashed out at sex and nudity on television. "You sit with your kids and you don't know what to do," he said in Lentegeur. Later in the month, speaking in Polokwane, he said that citizens should "defend" themselves against TV progamming that contained violence and sex.

Suggesting that age restrictions and content warnings were marketing ploys to get children to watch programmes with sex in them, he said "the children go to bed early, forcing their parents to go to sleep earlier, and then they get up and watch these programmes".

This came hard on the heels of his statements that teenage girls who fell pregnant should have their babies forcibly removed from them, and that they should be sent away. He also suggested that many teen girls fall pregnant simply so that they can access social grants.

But those bits of fundamentalism were just the warm-up act in the good reverend's tub-thumping crusade to be the new moral voice of South Africa.

Speaking in Polokwane on Wednesday, Zuma thundered out that "we need to teach our people to fear God". He went on to ask: "How do you teach society to fear God? Is it not by making children pray before school as it was in the past?"

One wonders how the ANC's partners in the Tripartite Alliance will view the following statement: "Even those who are not religious - they may be communists - must learn to fear others. We must also learn to fear our ancestors."

According to the report on the event in this newspaper, Zuma "decried what he described as the 'erosion of morality and values in our modern society' and called for a return to the norms of yesteryear, when orphans and the elderly were cared for by their communities and there was no need for orphanages or old age homes".

Well, at least that part of it makes sense.

But then he went on to tell the gathered religious leaders that we need to return to the days when traditional healers were made strong by being blessed by medicine men and women "to make them strong".

He added that in those same good old days, murderers would be "cleansed" to stop them killing. He was quoted as saying "scientists will argue and tell you this is nonsense. They will tell you to go for therapy - to talk to a psychiatrist for a long time. But there is a link".

Next he took aim at the Land Rights Act, an act which was carefully negotiated as part of the Codesa talks at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park as part of the run-up to the 1994 elections that brought South Africa democracy. He slammed it, saying it was "a very strange law" because land had been taken from black people over centuries, but that a relatively small window period had been set for them to get it back.

Reports had it that Zuma said "some people" said this was because the law had been drafted by whites.

Wham. With just months to go before the general election, the man who would be the next president of this country has: a) said he does not believe in children's rights; b) said he does not believe in the rights of teen mothers; c) said he does not believe in the separation of church and state; d) said modern science and the science of psychiatry are rubbish and e) has made a blatantly racist statement.