Former president’s victim narrative has a smidgen of merit

Once the most powerful man in SA, former president Jacob Zuma has insistently defined himself as a victim, whether in the court room or the political arena.

He accused former president Thabo Mbeki and his followers of driving the corruption and rape cases against him, telling the Supreme Court in Mauritius that the decision to charge him with corruption was part of a “carefully orchestrated, politically inspired and driven strategy to exclude me from any meaningful political role”.

That strategy, he claimed, was driven by his concern for “the masses and the poor”, which prompted his political enemies to try to deny him the ANC leadership and the state presidency.

Now that Zuma faces the prospect of going on trial for long-dormant corruption charges, his narrative of victimhood is likely to intensify. At the Easter weekend he told churchgoers in Durban that he continued to be “persecuted” after resigning as president. “Anyone who is being oppressed in different ways and accepts the oppression is committing a sin. I am still struggling while other people are free, I am not freer at all.”

But while his victim narrative is undermined by evidence of his abuse of state resources to avoid trial and protect his own interests, it is not entirely baseless. Here’s why: Zuma should have been put on trial with his financial adviser Schabir Shaik 14 years ago. That he wasn’t has never been satisfactorily explained.

Cast your mind back to 2003, when then national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka announced that he had decided to charge Shaik but not Zuma. Ngcuka’s decision was taken despite a recommendation by his own prosecutors that Zuma had a case to answer.

“We have concluded that, whilst there is a prima facie case of corruption against the deputy president, our prospects of success are not strong enough,” Ngcuka said. “Accordingly, we have decided not to prosecute the deputy president.”

That decision, with the benefit of hindsight, was bizarre and legally unsound. Zuma had a case to answer and he should have been allowed to answer it.

The state’s case against Shaik was built on evidence that he had made hundreds of payments to Zuma, in effect keeping him on a corrupt retainer, and orchestrated a R500,000-a-year bribe for Zuma from French arms firm Thint in exchange for the then deputy president’s protection from arms deal investigations.

The prosecution proved that there were four instances in which Zuma had done favours for Shaik as an apparent consequence of this allegedly corrupt arrangement. The Supreme Court of Appeal confirmed Shaik’s convictions, stating that the evidence proved “that the only reasonable inference is that the payments were corruptly made to influence Mr Zuma to act in conflict with his constitutional duties and enhance Mr Shaik and his group’s business interests”.

Zuma’s lawyer, Michael Hulley, has slammed the state for trying Shaik without Zuma, arguing that the former president regarded this as a means to “try him in the court of public opinion”, without him being given a chance to defend himself. Hulley has claimed under oath that the point of this strategy was to force Zuma out of political life.

THE TRAJECTORY OF HISTORY COULD HAVE BEEN CHANGED HAD NGCUKA TAKEN THE ADVICE OF HIS PROSECUTORS AND PUT ZUMA ON TRIAL

Before Ngcuka made his announcement that Zuma would not be charged, Hulley claims Mbeki and then justice minister Penuell Maduna met Zuma “and asked him to resign and effectively retire from the political scene. They indicated there was a formidable case against him .... Unbeknown to them, Ngcuka had told Zuma there was nothing in the case against him. Zuma said as much to Mbeki and Maduna and refused to resign.”

Hulley later claimed that “if Zuma left quietly, he would not be prosecuted and he would be well looked after financially”. (A R20m amount was mooted.)

Zuma “advised them that his understanding is that there was no case against him”.

Mbeki and Maduna have denied Zuma’s claims, which are likely to form part of his mooted application for a permanent stay of prosecution. But in the absence of a substantive legal explanation for why Zuma was not charged with Shaik, speculation about the political explanation for that decision will only intensify.

The trajectory of history could have been changed had Ngcuka taken the advice of his prosecutors and put Zuma on trial. Zuma could have answered the case against him, millions of rand in legal fees would have been saved and South Africans would know that no citizen was above the law. Instead, we are trying to rewind a deeply damaging history, with no real explanation for how we got here.