Support the rule of law

Although suspended to enable the medical examination of one of the defendants, the corruption and influence peddling trial in which former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is indicted commenced this week.

From a South African point of view, one of the discernible things about the proceedings at the French court was, and still is, the fact that no French soul is claiming political chicanery about the charges preferred against Sarkozy and his co-accused.

And so, no one has thought it heroic to subject the soles of their shoes to premature wear and tear and merciless fi ling against the obstinate surface outside the court, or carry expletives-inscribed placards. Which is not to ascribe any superior quality to the French.

After all, the fact that Sarkozy is standing trial for corruption is not only an indictment on his person. The land of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – liberty, equality, fraternity – whose affairs he presided over at the Palais de l’Élysée – the Mahlamba Ndlopfu and Union Buildings of France – for five years, ought to self-introspect inasmuch as it would be well advised to examine the unedifying chapters of its more than 200year post revolution history.

Sarkozy and his co-accused were accompanied to court only by their lawyers and next of kin. The battle for their acquittal is left to the lawyers. While appreciating that like him, judges are not value-free, Sarkozy hopes to clear his name in court.

Without doubt his lawyers will be the first to point out any errant conduct on the part of the judge.

In contrast, South African legal cases – more so those involving people in positions of leadership of especially the governing party – have, over the years, become highly charged political affairs.

A notable feature about them is that they are profitable sites for enthusiastic conspiracy theorists who spin all manner of yarns the details of which they promise to reveal “at the right time”.

Presumably because no conspiracy in fact exists, the present is always invariably not the right time to lay bare the supposed cloak-and-dagger machinations of those designated – often without a scintilla of evidence – as the opponents of the accused.

Court appearances have also become mass rally platforms in which campaigns for ascension to leadership positions are launched by way of delegitimising and eventually removing incumbents in order to thwart legal processes against the accused.

Taken together with the often reckless and unsubstantiated statements advanced against political opponents, the judiciary and other organs of state, there are many reasons for South Africans to be worried about this phenomenon.

Firstly, the base is being laid for the erosion and eventual defeat of the rule of law, with all the consequences implicit in such a prospect.

Secondly, since the conspiracy theories are spun to avoid legal and political accountability for wrongs committed, permanent stay of prosecution can only be achieved by politically intervening to quash charges. In the words of the Strategic Dialogue Group – a collective of former student and youth leaders in the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s – this means that “virulent factional politics and not the law will become the final arbiter of legal disputes”.

This is a subversion of the democratic process and its sacred principle of equality before the law. The subversion of the democratic process and the law can only benefit a minority predatory elite than the masses of the people whose name is vainly invoked and support sought to safeguard the private interests of those who happen to be in power.

Thirdly, for their lack of evidence, conspiracy theories increasingly stupefy the political process and society more broadly. Sooner or later, the search for higher principles becomes akin to looking for a needle in a haystack at a time when society is in desperate need for a reliable navigational beacon.

For the up-and-coming activist base, conspiracies and snake oil prescriptions to complex social problems become the stock-intrade which must come back to haunt them whenever logical and rational cogency is required. Reliance on crude numbers rather than the power of persuasion to which we are witness in the political arena is partly a product of the stripping of reasoned debate in politics.

Such a society is a dangerous place to live in. Say what you may, but there is nothing that the griots of such a tendency will not do once they have so decided.

Thirdly, the subversion process contains within it, dangerous Yeatsian seeds of things falling spectacularly apart, the centre ceasing to hold and mere anarchy being loosed upon the world.

The Soviet playwright Alexandra Gelman warned of this danger when he wrote in 1987: “You can be quite certain that if a single untouchable person emerges in a collective, a town, or in any place, then very soon those who immediately surround him will also become untouchable, then those who surround those who surround, and so on until very soon a mutual guarantee of untouchables will be formed, a vicious circle of untouchableness, that no one will be able to break until it cracks itself.”

Once impunity has reached widespread maturation, it must create pockets of banditry not only in politics but broader society. The ultimate cost to the country’s political culture and practice is frighteningly way too onerous.

So, as the season of trials for alleged corrupt activities by politically powerful personalities grinds ever so closely, South Africans had better be suspicious of claims for political conspiracy which are already being proffered by the affected and the like-minded. There is only one place to prove that charges are politically motivated and that is a court of law, not the streets and political platforms.

We dare not forget that what was rightly or wrongly referred to as “nine wasted years” commenced with an elaborate process that sought and succeeded to defeat the ends of justice by an array of political forces in and outside the governing party.

More than a decade later, the country is on the edge of a precipice. So, whenever someone attempts to entice us to support their attempt not to answer charges, we must remember that we are essentially conspiring against the future of our children.

Base is being laid for the erosion and defeat of the rule of law