“I can’t believe it,” Shabir Shaik reportedly exclaimed after the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) dismissed his petition against conviction on two counts of corruption and one of fraud. “Boom, boom, boom; one, two, three: they didn’t uphold anything. All the lawyers were wrong about what was going to happen.”
Shaik’s tragic surprise should sound a deep warning to ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma. The National Prosecuting Authority investigation is a legal juggernaut that has now arrived at his door — and he should regard the reassurances of his advisers with due scepticism.
Predictably, Zuma’s supporters have argued that the SCA decision on Shaik has no impact on Zuma. Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven insisted: “Zuma and Shaik are not the same person and each has a right to be tried completely independently.”
That is true, but the SCA ruling has effectively provided a roadmap for the prosecution of Zuma and, in some ways, the judgement is more damaging to him than Judge Hilary Squires’s original verdict, which led to his dismissal from government.
Firstly, while Squires’s background as a former justice minister in Rhodesia provided some purchase for critics, the SCA panel of judges that squarely and unanimously supported Squires’s ruling is not open to such criticism. Secondly, the way in which the SCA treated the admissibility of the notorious “encrypted fax” must give Zuma’s lawyers pause.
This fax was the secret memo that Alain ThÃ