ANC disowns Zuma supporters
THE ANC has once again called on members who wish to support former president Jacob Zuma during his court battle to do so in their private capacity.
“It is important that members who would prefer to go to court to pledge their own support, do so in their own capacity as individuals,” said ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe on Friday in a video posted on the party’s Facebook page.
“We also stated preferences on how we would love to see them conducting themselves to the extent that such conduct should be in keeping with upholding the good name of the ANC,” he added.
“We will not in any way take away the rights of individual members and their own preferences and all that, including declaring guilty verdicts on those expected to appear in court.”
Mabe said that Zuma was protected by the law and had a right to be considered innocent “unless proven otherwise”.
Zuma’s case, in which he is facing 16 charges relating to 783 payments he allegedly received in connection with the controversial arms deal, was postponed until June 8 in the Durban High Court on Friday morning.
Many supporters flocked to the site, dressed in the ANC colours of green, gold and black.
On Friday, Mabe also said that Zuma had attended the last national executive committee meeting held in Durban and had “greatly honoured” a pledge to take part in electioneering activity.
The country’s next national elections will be held in 2019.
Meanwhile, the team pursuing the corruption case against Zuma has asked a Pretoria lawyer, who helped produce evidence implicating the former president in the 1999 arms deal, to make a sworn statement.
Lead investigator, Colonel Johan du Plooy, this week approached Ajay Sooklal with the request to avail himself as a witness and to make a statement.
Du Plooy was the lead investigator in the corruption case against Zuma’s former financial advisor Schabir Shaik.
The statement will be accompanied by a confirmatory affidavit by Du Plooy, which will serve as a forerunner to the oral testimony when the trial starts later this year. Sooklal confirmed that the Hawks had approached him. He said that in addition to this, two non-governmental organisations had asked him to testify in the commission of inquiry into state capture.
Sooklal’s testimony is key to the state’s case against Zuma, due to his intimate knowledge of how the bribe from French arms company Thales was allegedly paid.
Zuma and his co-accused, Thales, represented by its group head of legal Christine Guerrier, appeared in the Durban High Court on corruption charges on Friday.
Prior to the court appearance, Thales wrote to KwaZulu-Natal director of public prosecutions Moipone Noko to ask that the charges against the company be withdrawn. They asked her to allow the company to justify the request.
Zuma is planning a long, drawn-out battle to fight the corruption charges — a battle that will take place inside the courts and on the streets.
But an increasingly dire financial situation could hamper the multi-pronged strategy that Zuma and his supporters launched last week. Unconfirmed reports say that up to R1m had to be hustled together last week to foot the bill for buses, posters and T-shirts. This bled the shoestring budget that had been put together.
Zuma planning a fresh round of applications and appeals that could indefinitely delay the start of the trial, which the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) wants to begin in November.
Zuma’s legal representatives said they would lodge a review application against the NPA’s decision to reinstate charges against him which, they said, would be completed by the end of May.
That application — should it fail — is likely to be followed by an application for a permanent stay of prosecution.
One of the options previously considered by Zuma’s defence team was to raise as a defence the legal principle of double jeopardy — which provides that a person cannot be charged for the same crime more than once. — News24