South Africa's Jacob Zuma is fast running out of political lives

Like the proverbial cat with nine lives, South Africa’s scandal-ridden president, Jacob Zuma, may well have escaped yet again with his political life. This despite another resounding loss in the country’s highest court. The Constitutional Court ruled that there was no constitutional bar to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Baleka Mbete, opting to employ a secret ballot in a no confidence vote in parliament. She’d originally asserted that she didn’t have the authority to make this decision, prompting several opposition parties – furious at Zuma’s increasingly dictatorial project of “state capture” – to take the matter to court.