Judges have served us, and our democracy, well

WEDNESDAY’s verdict by the High Court in Cape Town, declaring several initial steps in the intended nuclear new build programme illegal, is a victory for transparency, fiscal discipline, constitutionality and the fight against corruption.

The court reiterated a core value that the current government increasingly honours only in the breach: democracy is government by the people, for the people.

The court ruled that the government had attempted to smuggle through the nuclear deal. It laid down the law: there shall be consultation with South Africans and parliamentarians before any decision is taken on a nuclear programme, which experts calculate could cost as much as R1-trillion — money we don’t have and shouldn’t spend while so many suffer material deprivation.

The government must now lay bare its plans before the public for input and consultation and then submit these to parliamentary scrutiny. Constitutional democracy 101, one would have thought.

So why, then, did the powerful in the current discredited regime, and their pliable mandarins, not follow the simple process our constitution so clearly requires? What are they trying to hide?

It is not as if civil society and parliamentary opposition parties, notably the DA, EFF, IFP and ACDP, did not warn them continually for the past eight years against what has now been found to be illegal. Clearer it could not have been.

So why persist? Why was the nuclear agreement with Russia so much more detailed than those with the US and South Korea — as the court pointed out?

Why the inside track for Russia? Why the many visits to Russia by President Jacob Zuma, accompanied — all too often and unexplained — by State Security Minister David Mahlobo?

Be afraid, those who want to hide and obfuscate. Take heed and have hope, those who love democracy. The judges served South Africa well with this ruling.