Will Zuma’s inquiry stave off ejection of a rogue president?

This Tuesday — on the eve of the first ANC national executive committee meeting since President Jacob Zuma’s term as party president ended — he finally took the first steps towards instituting a commission of inquiry into state capture.

This came more than a year after former public protector Thuli Madonsela called for such a commission to be established within 30 days. Since then, the president has made various attempts to delay the commission.

Initially, Zuma’s stance was that he had not been given enough time to respond to the allegations put to him by Madonsela. This was followed by an approach to the courts to interdict the release of the report.

After that failed, Zuma went to court yet again to have the remedial actions prescribed in the report set aside. It was in the rejection of this request that the judges were scathing in criticising the president’s abuse of court processes.

Consequentially, the court instructed the president to pay costs out of his own pocket as a way of discouraging his now wellestablished practice of approaching the courts on matters deemed vexatious. Not surprisingly, Zuma appealed against that decision as well.

Then, in a surprising twist, the president conceded the need to establish the commission under the guidance of a judge appointed by the chief justice — as Madonsela had insisted.

Bizarrely, however, Zuma still insists that the order instructing him to pay the costs — of his failed court attempt to stop the establishment of the commission — out of his own pocket is flawed and he will continue with his appeal on that front.

In ordinary circumstances, the process of an appeal has the effect of suspending the pronouncements of the lower court whose judgment is the subject of the appeal. In other words, for as long as the president maintains that he is appealing against parts of the high court judgment, no legal compulsion exists for him to make an announcement that there will be a commission of inquiry into state capture.

One can only conclude that it was the politics of the day that eventually swayed his thinking. His announcement of the commission of inquiry to be headed by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo — the name provided by Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng as per the instructions of Madonsela — came hours before the first ANC national executive committee meeting since Zuma was replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa as the leader of the ANC.

Even though the new party national leadership structure is balanced between staunch Zuma supporters and those associated with the Ramaphosa slate before the party’s December conference at Nasrec, it is inevitable that the question of whether Zuma should be recalled will pop up in the special national executive committee meeting this week.

The theory of two centres of power would support the argument of those seeking the president’s immediate removal. In this theory, it is regarded as undesirable for the president of the ANC and the president of the country to be separate individuals.

The theory assumes that there might be disagreement between the two on matters of governance, which will create undue political friction. The most obvious example to support the two centres of power theory would be the ANC making a pronouncement that the government should implement, and the government failing to do so.

A decade ago, the ANC dealt with this dilemma by recalling the president of the country and installing the deputy president of the ANC as the leader of the country. The collateral damage from that decision is well known.

THE THEORY ASSUMES THAT DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN THE TWO ON MATTERS OF GOVERNANCE WILL CREATE UNDUE POLITICAL FRICTION

Ramaphosa campaigned for the position of ANC president on the ticket of anticorruption and a demand for the state-capture inquiry to be implemented without delay. Had Zuma failed to heed this warning, the theory of two centres of power would have been confirmed and this would give ammunition to his opponents within the national executive committee to call for his removal as head of state.

Having now instituted the inquiry, Zuma can legitimately argue that he is not a rogue president who will ignore directives from the ANC. Whether the members of the national executive committee will buy into this argument remains unknown. And so, we wait and see.