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
Jonny Steinberg: leaders depressed
It’s the same impulse that turned President Mbeki into an Aids denialist. To admit to the reality that Aids was a huge problem was to admit to the reality that many South Africans had a lot of sex with a lot of people. This would be difficult to admit if you were a bit sex-phobic and actually thought that the stereotype of voracious black sexuality was a bad thing.
In any case Steinberg concludes:
During the apartheid years, the liberation movement fashioned an image of the South African masses as inherently dignified, rising above their circumstances to throw off the shackles of oppression. Sure, there were pathologies, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed by civilised public policy, nothing that couldn’t be mended by the acquisition of power. If the cream of SA’s activists and exiles had been canvassed in April 1994, I doubt whether any would have questioned the proposition that crime would slowly decrease, our overflowing jails begin to empty, our people find a good deal more peace and equanimity in the texture of everyday life.
Instead, governance has been hard, hard, hard, SA’s pathologies so frustratingly stubborn. I think that under President Thabo Mbeki our government has begun to feel that the nation it inherited is dispiritingly and congenitally ordinary. Under Mbeki, a government has fallen out of love with its people, perhaps even feels shunned and betrayed by them.
And so it becomes too difficult for leaders to call a press conference and declare that they share our pain because the pain itself inspires too much shame. They cannot tell us that they will do their best to bring this and that crime down, because they have become convinced that their best isn’t good enough. Nothing is.
I think that our government is in a moment of depression. I think it is denying its depression. It needs to snap out of it. It needs to govern.
