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
Zuma may still be innocent but not untainted
The rejection by the Supreme Court of Appeal of the Shabir Shaik appeal on all three counts came as something of a surprise. Newspaper reports suggested that he would at least be acquitted on some counts. Now the SCA has confirmed the 15 year sentence and Shaik will have to go to jail.
Of course, the spin to protect Jacob Zuma has already started. In a statement the ANC Youth league had the following to say, according to a report on the Mail and Guardian online:
“We must at all times, observe the provisions of the Constitution of the republic, and desist a temptation to find any person guilty outside of the credible due processes of the law, as this undermines and violates important elements of the rule of law,” the league said. No court of law has found Zuma, the ANC deputy president, guilty of any wrong-doing, it said.
I have long thought that the use of the “innocent until proven guilty” argument is a complete perversion of the Constitution. On one level, yes, Mr Zuma has not been convicted of any crime and he is thus not a criminal. For that label to stick, a court of law will have to find him guilty of a crime beyond reasonable doubt. To prove a person’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt is an extremely high burden for the state to discharge, but this is for a reason. Once convicted, one could be sentenced to a long term in jail, so its imperative that a court should only convict in the most clear-cut cases. Mr Zuma is innocent until proven guilty and this means he cannot be put in jail.
But this does not mean that the rest of us must suspend all our faculties and pretend we have no opinion and no common sense view about Jacob Zuma and thus cannot make any moral or political judgment about a man whose friend and financial adviser has just been sentenced by a second court to 15 years in prison because of his generally corrupt relationship with Zuma. That is really a perversion of the notion of innocent until proven guilty, trying to export the principle (now becoming a slogan) from the legal arena where it is of fundamentally important principle, into the political and ethical arena. To say we as voters should not have any view on whether Zuma will make a good President despite a court having found that he was bribed is to ask us to believe in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. But maybe the Youth League believes in those things. After all, they once believed that Brett Kebble was also the victim of an NPA smear campaign so they will probably believe anything that is in their interest to believe.
