Courts doing a sterling job in stopping South Africa’s slide to a gangster state
We cannot have a proper democracy if one arm of the state is frequently forced to enter the other’s terrain
You don’t thank birds for flying or fish for swimming because that’s what they are supposed to do. But we have to doff our collective hats as citizens of this country to the courts.
They are doing a sterling job in pushing back the slide towards a gangster state.
The executive wing of the state has gone rogue and predatory and the legislative wing has failed to hold the executive to account.
The judiciary has repeatedly rapped both on the knuckles and ordered them to do the right thing. Even if that is the job of the judiciary in a constitutional democracy, it is still proper to acknowledge the good work the courts are doing.
For years, the executive obfuscated, ducked and dived over the shenanigans involving about R246-million spent to upgrade the president’s private homestead at Nkandla. Parliament did the same, establishing committees to stonewall all attempts to investigate the issue and it tried to find ways to whitewash the shameful conduct of the president.
The public protector was insulted and pilloried by both parliament and the executive for flagging the rot.
It was only the entry of the Constitutional Court into the shameful affair that resolved the matter. The president was found to have violated the oath of office and ordered to pay back millions of rand to the state that he had improperly benefited from.
Who can forget the absolute horror engineered by the minister of social development and the South African Social Security Agency, Sassa, who sat on their hands and did nothing to arrange for the payment of grants to millions of beneficiaries as of the beginning of April this year? It is an episode around which the smell of corruption lingered to high heaven. It was once more the Constitutional Court that came to the rescue of the beneficiaries and the entire country.
The latest involves the much-vaunted nuclear energy built project, around which rumours of corruption foul the air.
The high court in Western Cape declared the processes followed so far illegal and unconstitutional, and set the deals signed aside.
The big point is that without our independent and effective courts, South Africa would be a much more rotten place than it is now.
However, this state of affairs is not without its difficulties. We don’t want governance by the courts. We want to be governed by a properly functioning state that consists of parliament, the executive and the judiciary, each playing its part. We cannot have a proper democracy if one arm of the state is frequently forced to enter the terrain of the others to demand that they act legally, ethically and constitutionally.
It is up to the citizens of this country to ensure that the people that go to parliament are men and women of integrity and honour.
It is from this group that the people in the cabinet would come from, and it is they who must hold the president and his cabinet ministers to account.