HOME Affairs’ highly paid special adviser Mario Ambrosini has been taking some time off during the past two weeks to keep tabs on KwaZulu-Natal’s progress at the Constitutional Court. (Perish the thought that either he or his boss, Mangosuthu Buthhelezi, would do party work on government time).
Last week he was popping in and out of court during argument over the certification of the KwaZulu-Natal Constitution and this week he and his colleague, Walter Felgate, were around while the court heard KwaZulu-Natal’s objections to the provision of provincial powers in the national Constitution.
Both the provincial Constitution and the province’s bid for more powers under the national Constitution are the culmination of the Inkatha Freedom Party’s legal bid for more power. As the IFP’s legal whizz, Ambrosini is presumably keen for success.
But the province’s ambitions to go it alone have not been warmly received by the court. Constitutional Court president Arthur Chaskalson talked of the “inappropiate language” of the province’s Constitution, which appeared to have been drafted by a sovereign state. And several judges mauled the clause of the provincial Constitution which gives residents the duty to defend the province. One of them said it was clearly intended to legitimise armed secession.
Last month, the province faced an uphill struggle defending the constitutionality of four controversial Bills from the province’s legislature aimed at beefing up KwaZulu-Natal’s powers.