Quote of the week
Mr Zuma is no ordinary litigant. He is the former President of the Republic, who remains a public figure and continues to wield significant political influence, while acting as an example to his supporters… He has a great deal of power to incite others to similarly defy court orders because his actions and any consequences, or lack thereof, are being closely observed by the public. If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law. As this Court noted in Mamabolo, “[n]o one familiar with our history can be unaware of the very special need to preserve the integrity of the rule of law”. Mr Zuma is subject to the laws of the Republic. No person enjoys exclusion or exemption from the sovereignty of our laws… It would be antithetical to the value of accountability if those who once held high office are not bound by the law.
Secretary of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including Organs of State v Zuma and Others (CCT 52/21) [2021] ZACC 18
By the time we got to the Moustafa Mahmoud mosque around noon, it was packed. People were spilling into the streets, their prayer rugs rolled out on the pavement. In the women’s section, I spotted faces I had seen at the protests in the days before, many of them without prayer rugs, praying on the Egyptian flag instead. “Let us respect this sacred space,” the imam began his sermon through a loudspeaker, “and all turn off our phones.” The crowd—by then numbering in the thousands—erupted into laughter. – Yasmine El Rashidi in the New York Review of Books on the protest in Egypt on Friday. The regime had cut off all cell phone coverage that morning.
