Zuma’s legal chickens come home to roost in latest ruling
THE Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (Casac) welcomes the ruling from a full bench of the North Gauteng High Court declaring that President Jacob Zuma’s R17 million inducement to get the then National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) to vacate his office was unlawful.
Speaking in Johannesburg, Casac executive secretary Lawson Naidoo said: “In a carefully constructed judgment that skilfully joins the dots between a number of important legal cases, including the `spy tapes’ and Nkandla cases, once again President Zuma has been found to have acted unlawfully and in breach of his constitutional obligations. Clearly, his legal chickens are now coming home to roost.”
Naidoo added: “The losers are President Zuma, Mxolisi Nxasana, and Shaun Abrahams, but the real winners are the constitution and the rule of law. We must be grateful for the independence and quality of the judiciary in South Africa.”
Casac noted with concern the announcement from the Presidency that the judgment would be appealed, even though the president had yet to be given a full briefing on the decision.
This is a further example of precisely what the court noted has been “… the broader pattern of the president’s conduct in litigation, of defending what ultimately turns out… on the president’s own concession… to have been indefensible all along, banking on any advantage that the passage of time may bring” (paragraph 88 of the judgment).
In addition to the important findings about the unlawful settlement between the president and Nxasana, Casac welcomes the order of the court to declare certain provisions of the National Prosecuting Authority Act unconstitutional because, in essence, they give the president excessive power over the suspension of the NDPP and the extension of his or her tenure in office.
The flaw in the NPA Act has been exposed by Zuma’s conduct in recent years, and the court has now moved to recognise that the impugned provisions are in fact unconstitutional.
The institutional independence of an institution that the court emphasised is central to constitutional democracy. This important principle is now strengthened and the country should celebrate this fact and anticipate a brighter future in which the current culture of impunity is brought to an end. Madeniyah Hendricks Senior Administrator at Casac