A DEVELOPING STORY that’s being tucked away here and there across our national media deserves a lot more attention. Its main attraction? Well, it features a crude and deeply corrupt President who is also allegedly a sexual predator.

Political forces, which have eventually come to include leaders of the party that nominated him for the presidency in the first place, are massing to remove him from office. It’s now only a matter of days before he’s out.

Such a story might understandably carry some appeal for many Americans.     In South Africa, where it’s taking place, it is a matter of YUUUGE excitement. Until now President Jacob Zuma has survived as another apparent Teflon Don, evading the consequences of – to take just one instance – an independent judicial report showing that he flouted the country’s constitution by syphoning public funds into his private real estate assets. So it’s taken some time, but his day of reckoning is finally at hand.

Being the arrogant and garrulous man he is, however, he has insisted even in these last days (to a meeting of his party’s senior officers) that “the people still love me” – according to sources quoted by the local agency News24.

The people have certainly been at least tolerating him for long enough. And that’s despite some provocative challenges to either love or tolerance. Not least the alleged rape by this septuagenarian of a 31-year old female family friend. In that case a court acquitted him when he claimed it was was consensual sex.

Country-wide disgust, though, was compounded when he admitted that it was also unprotected sex, even though the woman was HIV-positive. He would normally have used a condom, he claimed, but didn’t have one handy at the time. Instead, he took a shower immediately afterward, which he said “would minimize the risk of contracting the disease”.

Zuma was, by the way, the nominal head of the country’s National Aids Council. So much for leading by example.

His imminent removal as head-of-state has looked well-nigh certain since back in December, when his party, the African National Congress, deposed him from the party’s presidency, and replaced him with Cyril Ramaphosa. (Below left, pictured13 years ago with founding President, the late Nelson Mandela.)

Ramaphosa is the country’s Vice-President, and it is he who will replace Zuma as national leader. He’s being characteristically canny (as befits a man whose ambitions for the highest office have been thwarted once before, when President Thabo Mbeki out-manoeuvred him) and in January he told eNCA, the country’s widely-watched 24-hour news channel, that “we should never do it in a way that is going to humiliate President Zuma.”

Ramaphosa professed his concern to maintain “the proper decorum”. He’s also concerned – as any politician would be – to avoid stirring up angry passions in the considerably shrunken, but still substantial body of support that Zuma can command. Ramaphosa wants, naturally enough, to lead a united not a divided country, unlike some leaders elsewhere that we might name.

Meanwhile he is engaged in direct talks huddled with with Zuma, and he promises to report back to the country “in coming days”.

JUST HOW MANY DAYS? Any country confronting such a sticky constitutional problem will have its own individual timetable. Sitting here in the US, I see in the South African experience little to bear on current American possibilities – except of course in the most hypothetical (really, I protest, the most hypothetical) of scenarios. But it does strongly echo a piece of relevant and very concrete US history. I’m thinking of the now-legendary visit by Republican grandees (including Senator Barry Goldwater) to President Richard Nixon on August 7th, 1974, pointing out to him in no uncertain fashion the reality of his situation.

It was the very next day, August 8th, that Nixon announced his resignation – effective the following noon.

As to our present-day American circumstances … newsrooms around the nation are having to eye their calendars. How long would such a process take, if it were to begin here? In President Donald Trump’s now favorite usage – which I notice has also spread into statements to the press from Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — “We’ll see what happens…”