Time for ‘lawfare’ in SA
Fight corruption with constitution, urges campaigner
CORRUPTION would continue for as long as people were prepared to stay silent and not use the powers available in the under-threat constitution, said seasoned anti-corruption campaigner Paul Hoffman.
He addressed 60 members of the University of the Third Age (U3A) in East London yesterday and sold and signed a number of copies of his latest book, Confronting the Corrupt.
Hoffman directs the NGO Accountability Now, which was set up in 2009.
He said corruption was so bad that it was time for “lawfare” – a term the NGO coined for people using the constitution to prosecute looters.
Hoffman’s address ranged through many postapartheid scandals in government and corporates, all underlining his life’s campaign for parliament to vote into power a Chapter 9 institute, the Integrity Commission.
This commission, said the 63-year-old retired silk who works as a volunteer, would have the power to force the state to investigate and prosecute corrupt politicians all the way to the top.
Turning to new public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, he said she may “have been a spy of old”, but she had definitely been untruthful about her first report to President Zuma.
She had told him in writing that there was no provisional report sent to Zuma about Absa being handed a “lifeboat” of R2-billion – state money believed to have been pillaged and stored in Bankorp by members of the outgoing apartheid regime.
Hoffman said he confronted Mkhwebane with evidence that she sent a letter to Zuma “repeatedly referring to the existence of the provisional report”.
“She said no. I was lied to,” said Hoffman. “She gave Jacob Zuma a Christmas present.”
Of great importance to him was the Constitutional Court’s finding that “cadre deployment” was illegal.
He explained this strategy as inserting ANC cadres into as many posts, preferably in government, as possible, regardless of skill or competence.
He said cadre deployment was being driven by the Leninist political ideology of a national democratic revolution (NDR), which was horribly abused under the brutal reign of Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin, and also in SA.
He urged the public to opt for the more rational, egalitarian and democratic path offered by the constitution.
He told the Saturday Dispatch: “Corruption is a problem of politics and political leadership.”
In his commentary, he said:
He was delighted that the Constitutional Court had found the the Independent Police Investigation Directorate should be independent of the executive (cabinet); and
Mandela’s 1994 nonracial constitutional democracy “went wrong” because of a failure of the administration and the broad majority of people to take the Bill of Rights seriously and exercise its powers in court. — mikel@dispatch.co.za