Make Zuma pay costs, ConCourt urged

The State Capture Inquiry contends that former President Jacob Zuma should pay the legal costs of its urgent Constitutional Court bid to compel him to give evidence – even though he chose not to participate in the case, notes legal writer Karyn Maughan in a News24 report. ‘We are using state funds to ensure his participation in a process where it is almost manifest that he is obliged to participate, also using state funds against somebody who has displayed a very high level of recalcitrance,’ Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC, for the inquiry, argued. The court, which heard the inquiry’s multi-pronged application against Zuma without the presence of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, has reserved judgment. Whatever the court decides will have potentially massive consequences for the commission, which is due to complete its work on 31 March – although it has applied for an extension – and maintains that Zuma's evidence is pivotal to that process. Ngcukaitobi has contended that Zuma's decision to send a one-page lawyer's letter, rather than a formal legal notice, to the country’s highest court in response to the commission’s application demonstrated his ‘disdain for the legal system’. In that letter, Zuma’s attorney, Eric Mabuza, stated that he would not participate in the case ‘at all’. That decision ‘is itself demonstrative of the general disdain with which he (Zuma) has been treating the legal system’, said Ngcukaitobi. ‘It was never intended to be a legally acceptable document and it came across that way. It was intended to tell everyone who intended listening or reading that, “actually, you can do whatever you wish, I am not participating”.’ By not participating in the case, Ngcukaitobi argued, Zuma had also chosen not to explain why he had walked out of the inquiry – an act which the commission contends amounted to criminal contempt.

Ngcukaitobi faced some tough questions about the commission efforts to get Zuma to testify – and why it did not subpoena him to appear far earlier than it did, notes a second News24 report by Karyn Maughan. Justices Mbuyiseli Madlanga and Chris Jafta repeatedly questioned Ngcukaitobi on why the commission chose to only subpoena the former President after hearing a ‘substantive’ and ‘adversarial’ application. ‘The need for the issuing of a summons was seen in December 2019 … can you please explain the need for a substantive application? I am totally confused as to why that is necessary,’ Madlanga said, before describing that protracted subpoena application – the only one of its kind to be heard in the commission's history – as a ‘total waste of time’. Madlanga repeatedly suggested that the inquiry was responsible for creating the urgency with which it has now brought that case. ‘Once a point was reached that it is now necessary to issue a summons, and this as far back as December 2019, so once that point is reached, why not simply issue a summons for an appearance in January 2020?’ he asked. Ngcukaitobi responded that the subpoena application had followed Zuma's repeated claims that he wanted to co-operate with the commission, as well as his failure to appear because he was receiving medical treatment. As such, he said, Zondo wanted to hear Zuma's ‘side of the story’ before issuing the subpoena for him to appear.