Twin attacks on Zuma in SCA, ConCourt

While President Jacob Zuma was debating ANC policy last week, the opposition DA and EFF were pushing two different courts to ensure that he was held to account. Each party separately argued that it was vital that an example be made of him, notes a Mail & Guardian report. ‘If we let misconduct and abuse of power slide, we create the foundation for a weak Constitution which serves the powerful, not the people, and will ultimately collapse,’ said EFF counsel Tembeka Ngcukaitobi in heads of argument filed in the Constitutional Court. ‘Holding back on the prosecution of the powerful, in the face of compelling evidence, would be a radical departure’ for SA, said a DA counsel, Sean Rosenberg SC, in his argument, filed in the Supreme Court of Appeal in Zuma’s bid to appeal the reinstatement of corruption charges against him. The EFF wants the Constitutional Court to force Parliament to convene an inquiry into whether Zuma lied to it during the course of the Nkandla scandal, a process that could lead to his impeachment. ‘The executive will only be incentivised to tell the truth if there are consequences when it does not,’ the EFF told the Constitutional Court. The M&G says the EFF has carefully not asked the Constitutional Court to find Zuma actively abused state resources, or to find that he intentionally misled Parliament when he said his family was not benefiting from state spending at Nkandla. Nor does it want the highest court in the land to find that he ‘spent public money on further investigations solely to protect his ill-gotten gains’, as it alleges. Instead, it has asked the court to make Parliament look into those allegations and hold an inquiry that would amount to a public grilling.

Full Mail & Guardian report