Fight over president’s campaign funding heads to the Concourt
THE legal battle over the funding of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s multi-million rand CR17 ANC leadership campaign is heading to the Constitutional Court.
Public Protector Busi Mkhwebane, the EFF and the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism are taking their fight for access to the financial records of Ramaphosa’s CR17 campaign to the apex court.
In March, a full bench of the North Gauteng High Court – Judge-President Dunstan Mlambo, judges Keoagile Matojane and Raylene Keightley – reviewed, declared invalid and set aside Mkhwebane’s decision to investigate and report on the CR17 election campaign for the ANC leadership elected in December 2017.
The high court found that Mkhwebane had no jurisdiction to investigate the complaints lodged by former DA leader Mmusi Maimane and EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu as well as the CR17 campaign and its donations.
However, Ramaphosa has come out guns blazing against attempts to appeal the high court ruling reviewing and setting aside Mkhwebane’s report on his CR17 ANC presidential campaign.
In an affidavit filed by Ramaphosa’s lawyer Peter Harris of Harris Nupen Molebatsi Attorneys, the president states that the issues amaBhungane seek to ventilate in the apex court were not decided at the high court because the centre elected not to enter into the debate regarding the proper interpretation of the Executive Ethics Code.
“The application for the declaration of the Executive Ethics Code as unconstitutional was based on an interpretation which was never reached by the (high) court. Now amaBhungane wished this court to be the court of first and last instance in its constitutional challenge,” reads Harris’ affidavit dated July 27.
He argued that once the country’s highest court rejected amaBhungane’s patently false and disingenuous claims its application is laid bare as nothing more than an attempt to re-argue its high court case hoping the apex court will entertain it.
Ramaphosa wants the appeal to be dismissed with costs.
According to Harris, amaBhungane’s reasons for asking the Constitutional Court to entertain its application are without merit and mutually destructive.
He told the court amaBhungane were plainly wrong to claim that the high court found that the Ethics Code did not require the disclosure of donations made to intra-party campaigns such as the CR17 campaign.
Harris also disputed amaBhungane’s claim that the high court should have dealt with the merits of its challenge based on the principle that the court of first instance must deal with all issues before it.
The EFF has asked that the high court stay its application for leave to appeal the March ruling pending the determination of its conditional appeal to the Constitutional Court.
At the high court, the EFF applied for leave to appeal the full bench’s judgment to the Supreme Court of Appeal.
In an affidavit filed by its leader Julius Malema in May, the EFF insisted that Mkhwebane had the requisite jurisdiction to investigate the CR17 campaign as Ramaphosa has a duty to avoid the risk of conduct placing him in conflict of interest.
Malema said Ramaphosa set up the CR17 campaign as a scheme to avoid the duty to account for the donations it received from which the president derived a benefit.