Zuma camp’s strategy will put us on fast track to doom

At first sight, deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo seems amiable enough, someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly. But might we all, along with Jacob Zuma, have completely misread him? And missed the fact that underneath the surface lies a steely determination?

By now, many South Africans will be exasperated at his often avuncular approach to witnesses at the state capture commission, particularly those who rock up only to declare their reluctance to answer questions or who feign amnesia.

But it is his handling of the most important witness of all, the former president accused of being the chief enabler of state capture, that’s left many puzzled.

They wonder why Zondo allowed Zuma to play cat and mouse with the commission for so long, placing hurdle after hurdle in the path of efforts to put him on the witness stand. These included being excused to attend a funeral and demanding that Zondo recuse himself due to alleged conflict of interest (denied by Zondo). And finally, that the entire judicial system, including the commission, is rigged against the former president.

Overall, Zondo has appeared to treat Zuma with the softest of kid gloves, even deference. The Constitutional Court, in ordering Zuma to attend the inquiry, suggested Zondo may have shown him too much leniency.

So, what’s going on in the inscrutable mind of Raymond Zondo?

Could it be that, with his vast experience of the workings of the legal system, he has chosen to give Zuma a long rope, with which the reputed master strategist has proceeded to hang himself?

It turns out the soft-spoken deputy chief justice has a mean streak after all. Going for the jugular at the Constitutional Court, he proposed the especially harsh sentence of imprisonment for Zuma. No more Mr Nice Guy.

And with Zuma having publicly condemned the judicial system as untrustworthy, even daring it to jail him, it will be interesting to see what case he makes in his defence when called upon to do so. He may find he has run out of road, legally.

But legal combat to avoid accounting for the serious crimes in which he is implicated is not Zuma’s primary strategy. He and his followers — self-styled champions of radical economic transformation (RET) — have chosen the streets as their terrain. That’s where, they reckon, they can win fights they cannot win in the courts, including letting Zuma go scot-free.

The battle of the streets, which has already started, is premised on delegitimising the judicial system in the eyes of the public. Judges, it is alleged, can no longer be trusted to be impartial and some are bribable by powerful forces in society.

Second, the plan is to portray all those in the RET camp who are in trouble with the law as innocent victims of political scheming by stooges of “white monopoly capital”. The aim, of course, being to make it impossible for them to be brought to book without evoking public scepticism about state organs. Perhaps even sympathy.

And third, they try to use their participation in the anti-apartheid struggle as a free pass. That’s why his supporters make much of Zuma’s struggle credentials. The ludicrous implication being that those who fought in the struggle must be treated differently, better, than every other citizen.

This is inimical to the whole objective of the struggle, which was to build a society where everybody would be treated equally and be subject to the same laws.

Many of Zuma’s supporters call themselves Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) veterans. They may want to familiarise themselves with what the first commander-in-chief of MK, Nelson Mandela, said about equality under the law. When summoned to court in his dispute with the South African Rugby Football Union, Mandela, then still head of state, obliged.

Granted, many of those marching for Zuma now would have been barely out of their nappies at the time. The older ones may have conveniently forgotten Mandela’s words.

He explained his decision thus: “The independence of the judiciary is one of the pillars of our democracy and equally fundamental is the commitment to abide by the decisions of the courts, whether they are in one’s favour or not. I wished by example to support that principle by obeying the summons to appear in court.”

Only this week ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa and the party’s national executive committee made a point of publicly endorsing the work of the Zondo commission.

The fact that Zuma and his proxies choose to attack the judiciary and the commission indicates that not everyone in the party buys into the concepts of constitutionalism and true democracy. Some subscribe to them only to the extent that it fits their self-interest.

And if it does not, they stand ready to reach for the old, cynical, playbook of anti-democrats everywhere — using illegal, unconstitutional and, if necessary, violent means to achieve their aims. With their dark threats of social “instability” if the law takes its course against Zuma, his supporters must surely foresee the potential for violence in their approach.

The issue at hand is not just a private matter between two powerful men. At stake is essentially what kind of society we want to become now and to build for future generations of South Africans. Is it one that subscribes to constitutionalism and the rule of law, or an anarchic one where some are more equal than others, based on their political or other status?

If Zuma and his fellow travellers have their way, they will lead us down a path where only the most brutish survive; where “big men”, to get what they want, simply deploy their army of goons to intimidate and bully whole societies; and where the courts are putty in the hands of street mobs.

That’s the road to perdition.

They may want to familiarise themselves with what Mandela said about equality under the law