Someone should bring him, Sarkozy and Obama to a table and shout at them 'stop being so ambitious'.

Keating recognizes that the South African president can no more convert intransigents than can any other human being, but insults the man liberally because it's noticed when he leaves the comfort of his homeland to do his best in other, unpleasant places. Sheesh.

The stature of South Africa's leaders seems to have been in a steady decline from Mandela through Mbeki (300000 aid deaths on his head) to Zuma. We seem to be watching a repeat of the old road through croneyism and kleptocracy to national bankruptcy. As Adam Smith wrote "There is a lot of ruin in a nation." and it will take a long time to bring South Africa down in the same way as Ghana, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe but it's only a matter of time.

Zuma's failure to mediate is the wrong headline on this article. That facts? History! Beginning with former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who tried unsuccessfully to mediate with Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe departure, Jacob Zuma has also not succeeded in his efforts to convince Mugabe to retire and save Zimbabwe from its current state of social and economic breakdown. Zimbabwe is still today the equivalent of "a Haiti of Africa!" But Mugabe will stay in office until he dies because the Zimbabwe army is controlled by Mugabe's sidekicks, and he doesn't care for the suffering of his people.

The same thing happened in Ivory Coast. Jacob Zuma's attempted to inject some sanity into former Ivory Coast's strongman Laurent Gbagbo, but Gbagbo decided to stay as dictator of Ivory's Coast on the strength and support of his army. Gbagbo is in prison now, thanks to the involvement of the French peacekeeping in Ivory Coast that helped Alexandro Quattara to oust him by force. That also was not Jacob Zuma's failure; it was the lunacy of Gbagbo - like that of Mugabe- that could not be pushed aside. And in such cases - as we see now at the expanding civil strife in Yemen, where another its lunatic president Ali Abdullah Saleh refuses to relinquish power, no negotiations or negotiators can succeed - no matter if it is Zuma, or the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Gadhafi is just another lunatic in the Robert Mugabe, Laurent Gbagbo, and Ali Abdullah Saleh group of unpopular and capricious despots that won't relinquish power unless they are forced militarily. To blame Jacob Zuma, therefore for incompetence to rationalize capricious dictators, and turn them into benevolent statesmen, is an affront to the South African president. Gadhafi is on course to meet Laurent Gbagbo's fate. I am sure Jacob Zuma told him that. But Gadhafi's overblown and twisted ego is fully disconnected from reality, and he cannot accept that he is not a master of his fate anymore.

The Muammar Gadhafi saga is now at the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" stage, where rationality has become "Non-Existent!" The argument presented in the article, therefore, that Jacob Zuma failed to present a "road map" that might have resolved the Libyan conflict, is out of place. Simply speaking, "Road Map" became "defunct" in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, and it has since become a useless, worthless and bankrupt semantic. There is only one "valid" phrase remaining now to solve the Libyan conflict: Gadhafi's ouster is "NOT NEGOTIABLE," either to the Libyan rebels, or to the Western powers.
Nikos Retsos, retired professor