CHARLES W. PICKERING US Court of Appeals judge

A healthy democracy requires a decent society; it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant and respectful

THIS week, the Class of 2020 finally received their matric results. It’s a very late start to the year and the rest of their lives but, then again, this is the time of the plague and nothing is the same.

This was also the week where Jacob Zuma was finally informed that he would go on trial on May 17. He’ll be tried for the same crime of corruption that his erstwhile financial adviser Schabir Shaik was charged with and then sentenced to 15 years in jail by Judge Hilary Squires.

Shaik only spent 28 months behind bars, before being released on medical parole. He made a Lazarus-like recovery from his terminal condition and by last year had “served” his entire sentence. Zuma, on the other hand, has spent almost every day of the last 15 years trying to frustrate any bid to hold him to account, despite telling everyone that all he wanted was his day in the dock.

That wasn’t all he was up to. There’s also state capture. This week, Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo’s officials asked the Constitutional Court to jail Zuma for two years for the unprecedented contempt he has shown the commission (a recalibrating of the Stalingrad defence he pioneered), for point blank refusing to appear as a witness to the ongoing horror show of revelations of corruption and brazen looting that Zondo has to chair.

It’s been a bad week for Zuma, but spare a thought for the class of 2020. Their futures might have been delayed by the coronavirus – one of the few calamities that in all fairness can’t be