IN CONVERSATION WITH FORMER PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI
Ex-president says state violates legal processes
FORMER president Thabo Mbeki has defended the judiciary for its spate of judgments against the government.
Mbeki, in an interview with the Sunday Times this week, said rulings like the recent one over President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle should serve as a warning to the government that the law was absolute and that the state should not violate its own processes.
This will put Mbeki at loggerheads with the ANC, which lambasted the judiciary after the High Court in Pretoria ordered Zuma to provide the DA with a record of the decision for the reshuffle at the end of March in which finance minister Pravin Gordhan and his deputy Mcebisi Jonas were fired.
The ANC denounced the court order as “unfettered encroachment of the judiciary into the realm of the executive”.
Speaking on the sidelines of the National Foundations Dialogue Initiative launch on Friday, Mbeki said the government was losing many court cases brought against it because it violated its own processes and procedures.
He said court judgments against the government showed that South Africa was a country where the rule of law prevailed.
“This ought to serve as a warning to the government that the requirement to respect the law is really absolute,” Mbeki said.
“Otherwise somebody is going to take them to court and the court will find against them if they violated issues like processes.”
He said the judiciary had not “overreached anything”.
“For example . . . the judgment of the Cape Town High Court on this nuclear issue. They are not saying the government must not take decisions about nuclear power, they are not saying that.
“But they are saying the processes of reaching a decision . . . there are legal steps which government must take,” he said.
Last month the court in Cape Town set aside the determination signed by former minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson which lays the basis for nuclear procurement.
Judge Lee Bozalek found that the request for information issued by Eskom in December last year was unlawful and unconstitutional.
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation is among several foundations — including the Albert Luthuli Foundation and those of the Tutus and former presidents FW de Klerk and Kgalema Motlanthe — that have launched the dialogue initiative.
Mbeki said the aim was to draw up a national consensus on the challenges facing South Africa, particularly in terms of the economy and governance, and try to find solutions.
He acknowledged that the government would be free to ignore whatever recommendations arose from the dialogue.
“I am sure they [the foundations] are not going to transform themselves into some kind of implementation agent. It would then be up to whoever in society to help,” Mbeki said.
“I’m sure parliament will be given a copy [of the initiative’s report].”
He said the conversation would not be limited to political parties and the government.
“Do you just fold your arms and say you expect somebody else to produce a better future?” Mbeki said, referring to members of the business community who he said should be part of the initiative.
He said society as a whole needed to be involved in building South Africa’s future, and should not delegate the task to politicians.
Mbeki said “the current discourse” could be focusing too narrowly on Zuma.
“In the construction of society you’ve got to deal with this thing in different ways,” he said.
“I am sure in the course of the national dialogue, people will be raising issues not only of the president. It is a totality of issues of the society.”
Mbeki said communities should be free to express whatever issues were on their mind and should not be intimidated by political parties.
“In fact, some of what I have seen, you feel rather sorry for the political parties because of the way the local population speaks,” he said.
Mbeki steered clear of commenting on the crisis in the ANC, which is increasingly split between factions for or against Zuma.
He said there was still a long time before the ANC’s elective conference in December.
“I don’t know what it would say when the ANC membership gets together in that national consultative conference to look at the state of the ANC . . . that would be one of the things that would determine the outcome of the December conference.
“It would be too early for anybody now to say what it is that would happen in December. I think there are a lot of processes in between,” he said.
This year marks a decade since the ANC forced Mbeki to resign as president of the country — a year before his term of office was due to end.
Asked whether he thought Zuma should be subjected to the same process, Mbeki said it was a question for the ANC leadership to answer.
Do you just fold your arms and say you expect somebody else to produce a better future?