A price too great to pay
SOUTH Africa was treated to the spectacle this week of a cabinet minister speaking out about the rumours of his impending arrest. Pravin Gordhan finally broke his silence to bemoan what is effectively a state within a state; hell bent on undermining the very institutions that underpin our constitution and guarantee our sovereignty, for their own ends.
It’s an unprecedented public statement, but then again these are unprecedented times. While we accept that no one is above the law, it seems surreal, if not downright bizarre, that a cabinet minister of all people should be under such risk of arrest on spurious charges that he should have to speak out about it, because obviously he cannot rely upon his boss to do so for him.
And therein lies the rub: the very people apparently preparing a dossier against him – which constitutional and criminal law experts agree is baseless – ultimately report to the same boss that he does, President Jacob Zuma. Surely, if there were a prima facie case against Gordhan, he should be suspended, as erstwhile President Thabo Mbeki did to Zuma himself, when Zuma was his deputy and was implicated in the Shaik case?
But if there is no case to answer, the National Prosecuting Authority needs to stop preparing a case against Gordhan, which prosecutors have admitted they are already doing – which in itself is not just vexatious but unconstitutional.
The argument that demoting or transferring Gordhan would harm the rand is facile and indeed spurious, when we consider the damage this latest round of scaremongering and political interference is doing.
Instead, the only thing we can be sure of is that if everything Gordhan is saying is true, all the reports of his, and others’, impending arrests on trumped-up charges are true too.
The only inference that can then be drawn is that Zuma and his cronies, chief among them the controversial Gupta family, are hell bent on getting rid of Gordhan in order to clear their way to finally and irreversibly plunder the state’s coffers.
It’s a zero-sum game in which we, the citizens, pay the price at every spin of this mad carousel.