Wiechers a thorn in side of apartheid government

A constitutional law expert who helped draft SA's interim Constitution, Professor Marinus Wiechers, who died recently in Pretoria at the age of 80, was a thorn in the side of the apartheid government. According to an obituary in the Sunday Times, he dug the foundations of South African administrative law, which paved the way for the judicial review of government actions post-1994. His ground-breaking book on administrative law in 1973, arguing that the courts needed more power over the administrative actions of the government, was anathema to the apartheid government. Coming from anyone at that time, let alone an Afrikaner academic trained at the University of Pretoria (UP) and teaching at Unisa, the idea that the apartheid government should have to submit its actions to judicial review was incendiary stuff, says the Sunday Times. It put Wiechers on a collision course with the government, which reacted as if his concept of administrative law was akin to an attack on the state. His book was savaged by its lackeys in academia who questioned the very notion of administrative law. Far from recanting, he published the book in English during the state of emergency in the mid-1980s when the government was trashing the rule of law as never before. It might be said without much exaggeration, observes the writer, that the battle for administrative law that he launched in 1973 has, almost half a century later, saved the country from Jacob Zuma and state capture.