Sacked Zuma lawyer hits out at judge Pillay
• Mantsha says high court findings against former client were ‘highly political’ and biased
Daniel Mantsha, who was recently fired as former president Jacob Zuma’s lawyer, has hit out at KwaZulu-Natal judge Dhaya Pillay, saying her judgment against his client was biased and “highly political in its one-sided narration”. Mantsha was fired by Zuma after he filed a bizarre 115-page affidavit on behalf of the former president at the Constitutional Court, as part of Zuma’s now-abandoned campaign to permanently stop his corruption trial.
Daniel Mantsha, who was recently fired as former president Jacob Zuma’s lawyer, has hit out at KwaZulu-Natal judge Dhaya Pillay, saying her judgment against his client was biased and “highly political in its one-sided narration”.
Mantsha was fired by Zuma after he filed a bizarre 115-page affidavit on behalf of the former president at the Constitutional Court, as part of Zuma’s nowabandoned campaign to permanently stop his corruption trial from proceeding.
In that application, Zuma said he would only have testified at the trial of his former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, if he had been offered immunity from prosecution by the state — an apparent admission of his complicity in Shaik’s crimes.
Before being dismissed, however, Mantsha turned to the Supreme Court of Appeal in a bid to overturn the defamation ruling given against Zuma by Pillay — largely on the basis that she had “demonstrated a lack of impartiality which should vitiate her judgment”.
Zuma’s lawyers are trying to persuade the court to hear his challenge to Pillay’s ruling that his tweet about former tourism minister Derek Hanekom being a “known enemy agent” was false and defamatory.
In her decision, Pillay described the litigation between Zuma and Hanekom as “a proxy for the internal conflict within the ANC ”— essentially focused on the battle between those who, like Hanekom, fought for Zuma to be ousted, and those who continued to support him.
“This litigation is a battle or skirmish in the overall war for dominance and control of the ANC by one or other faction. The conflict is intractable political contestation for which a legal resolution is sought,” she said in her ruling.
“Mr Zuma mistakenly assumes that loyalty to the ANC is synonymous with loyalty to him. His assumption is both factually and constitutionally untenable,” Pillay said.
In papers filed at the appeal court, Mantsha argues that the “political analysis that the judgment goes into, is simply inappropriate and does not assist in resolving a simple legal question which was whether the publication of a statement on Twitter by Mr Zuma, in the context of a political debate, was wrongful”.
During his evidence before the commission on state capture chaired by deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo in July last year, Zuma blamed his legal and political difficulties on a threedecade plot hatched against him by two foreign intelligence agencies and apartheid intelligence authorities. He said these shadowy forces were intent on assassinating his character — and had attempted to kill him on multiple occasions — because he knew the identities of “agents” planted in the ANC.
Days after giving that testimony, and in response to EFF leader Julius Malema’s revelations that Hanekom “gave us the list of the ANC MPs who were going to vote with us in the vote of no confidence against Jacob Zuma”, Zuma tweeted: “I’m not surprised by @Julius_S_Malema revelations regarding @Derek_Hanekom. It is part of the plan I mentioned at the Zondo commission. @Derek_Hanekom is a known enemy agent.”
Zuma’s lawyers continue to insist his tweet about Hanekom was written “in the context of the undisputed allegations made by Malema about (Hanekom’s) clandestine role in toppling (Zuma) from the position of state president” and did not state that he was an apartheid spy.
Pillay had rejected that argument on the basis that the removal of ANC presidents by the party’s national executive committee was not unusual, and Zuma had failed to produce evidence to show Hanekom was, in fact, “an agent of the EFF”.
Pillay was the judge who refused to accept the alleged “sick note” Mantsha handed to the high court in Pietermaritzburg as evidence that Zuma was unable to attend his last criminal court hearing.
Pillay issued an arrest warrant for Zuma, which she then suspended.
Zuma will need to address his absence from court when the case against him resumes on June 23.