Zuma’s legal bind a signal to others

It has always stuck in the throats of honest South African taxpayers that civil servants and politicians accused of wrongdoing have been able to rub salt into those wounds by using government money to mount their legal defences. One of the worst in that respect has been former president Jacob Zuma, who is well-known for his “Stalingrad strategy” when it comes to keeping legal reckoning at bay.

(It’s referred to as Stalingrad after the street-bystreet, house-by-house fighting by Russian troops to keep the Germans from taking that city in World War II. Eventually the Germans were worn down and defeated.)

Zuma and his various expensive legal teams have fought interdict by interdict and application by application, trying to triumph against the law of the land.

However, he is now in the last trench and almost out of legal ammunition. A full bench of the High Court in Pretoria rejected his application for leave to appeal against its decision that he personally pay his legal costs – and on a punitive scale, too.

The only way he can now avoid “paying back the money” – for his string of court actions against former public protector Thuil Madonsela’s state capture report – is to petition the Supreme Court of Appeal or the Constitutional Court. Legal experts don’t believe he would succeed in either case.

This is good news because it is comeuppance for a man at the centre of the state capture morass who has repeatedly shown contempt not only for the judicial system, which he tried to pervert on several occasions, but also for the people. Under his tenure, South Africa went backwards and people suffered.

This should be a warning to other accused state officials that they could end up being personally liable for their legal costs.