Sudden enthusiasm for the Constitution
FOR WEEKS now, former president Jacob Zuma’s stated intention to defy a Constitutional Court order that he appear before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture has dominated the news.
The situation in South Africa is fraught because this is an untested democracy. Zuma and his cronies are hacking at its very roots.
Some rag-tag members of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, have sworn to protect Zuma with their lives if an arrest is attempted.
At the same time, there have been skilfully amplified expressions of support for Zuma from some ANC branches.
The impasse coincides with a tightening of the legal net around ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, who has ignored instructions to step down until his trial on corruption charges is over.
The same Radical Economic Transformation supporters who back Zuma are there to support Magashule.
They claim the charges against Magashule are a political set-up and have “nothing to do with the law”. They want an “immediate investigation” into the “compromised” and “captured” judiciary.
These intimations of resistance against supposedly illegitimate state structures creates space for South
Africa’s most dangerous political opportunist, EFF leader Julius Malema. They chime perfectly with his own ambitions to discredit a judicial system that threatens him and his party.
Malema this week warned that judges were “not special” and some would “rise against them” if they abused their powers. The EFF found believable claims that prominent members of the judiciary were in the payroll of the “white capitalist establishment”.
The EFF has influence way beyond its sparse electoral support. Desperate as the ANC is to restore the EFF to the fold, it has consistently done everything possible to placate them.
But appeasement is at best a way to win breathing space, not a solution in itself. Zuma’s defiance of the Zondo commission has drawn a line. A tussle looms.
To open the batting, Ramaphosa has sent in Justice Minister Ronald Lamola, who spoke at length against “spurious attacks” on the judiciary that were undermining confidence in the system.
“The Constitution and the rule of law are sacrosanct components of our democracy and people must respect these principles. To allow anything else will lead to anarchy and open the floodgates easily to a counter-revolution.”
It’s an interesting turn of phrase by Lamola, for not only is South Africa an untested democracy but it is an uneasy one. The words “revolution” and “counter-revolution” are important in the ANC lexicon.
In a rambling and somewhat incoherent article last week, ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte appeared to suggest that the Constitution itself is counter-revolutionary.
The thrust of the article was how Zondo was impudently challenging the very basis of the ANC’s existence – that its representatives were accountable first to the party, since their authority came directly from the people, and only then to the Constitution.
Although Duarte has since half-heartedly apologised to Zondo for her words, she articulated an important view within the alliance.
For all Duarte’s muddle and non-sequiturs, she gives us a glimpse of how a sizeable number of ANC leaders see the Constitution: an inconvenient impediment to the revolutionary quest of the ANC, imposed on the people by an ANC leadership at the time that at best did a naive deal, at worst a traitorous one.
And while Lamola is correct that Zuma and Malema’s failure to respect the Constitution and the rule of law could destroy our democracy, we should doubt his sincerity. Zuma and his mob’s belief that the former president is being politically railroaded is, in essence, correct.
The ANC has for almost three decades placed party interests above national interests, successfully skirting the law to protect the thieves and thugs within the tripartite alliance.
It was not until it dawned that state capture could see the party being voted out of office, that those ANC leaders who had tacitly tolerated corruption – like Ramaphosa – decided that some high-profile examples would have to be made.
This is a shortened version of the Jaundiced Eye column that appears weekly on Politicsweb.Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye