The campaign to ensure that Jacob Zuma succeeds Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa has produced a virus that threatens the health of many of our key democratic institutions. The executive, the National Prosecuting Authority, the press and the judiciary have all fallen to the attack — and the coherence of the ruling party, itself a key to the success of our peaceful transition to constitutional democracy, has been shaken.
The latest attack on the judiciary should be cause for a rational contemplation of the reasons for and the effects of this pathology.
The Supreme Court of Appeal produced a judgement of 92 pages in which it carefully analysed the trial record and the judgement of Judge Hilary Squires, and confirmed the conviction of Schabir Shaik. Regarding the charge that Shaik had engaged in corruption by plying Zuma with favours that benefited Shaik and his companies, the appeal court drew the following conclusion from the documents produced before the trial court: “The attitude exhibited by Shaik in the corresÂpondence … is completely destructive of his counsel’s contention that the Shaik-Zuma interaction was reasonably and possibly prompted by nothing more than mutual assistance of close friends.”
This finding has clear implications for Zuma. It is hardly the kind of result that his supporters had hoped would be forthcoming.
And then it is discovered that the appeal court had employed a phrase — “generally corrupt relationship” — that had only appeared in the press but not in Squires’s judgement. The Zuma defenders spring into action. No less a person than trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi (Mail & Guardian, November 17) calls for the resignation of the judges, suggesting that the court did not bother to read the trial record, but relied instead on the newspapers.
Let us agree that the appeal court was inexcusably sloppy in the separate judgement dealing with the confiscation of Shaik’s assets, where it attributed the phrase to Squires. But let us reproduce the next paragraph of the judgement:
“For the purpose of the confiscation orders the particular intervention by Zuma which was of consequence was a meeting between himself and Mr Perrier, the chief executive of the Thomson group, during a visit by Zuma to London in his capacity as member of the Executive Committee: Economic Affairs and Tourism in the province of KwaZulu-Natal on July 2 1998. As explained in the judgment of this court in the criminal appeal, that meeting took place at a time when the future participation of Shaik and his companies in the pending arms contracts, which had been put out to tender by the South African government, stood in serious jeopardy. The reason was that Thomson, with whom Shaik had been negotiating to obtain an interest in African Defence Systems (ADS), which was effectively one of the tenderers, had, for reasons explained in the judgment, lost faith in the credentials of Shaik and the Nkobi group … As a result of Zuma’s intervention, it was common cause, Thomson agreed to relocate the ADS shares into Thomson-CSF and, eventually, did so. We have held in the criminal judgment that Zuma’s involvement in July 1998 fell within the scope of Shaik’s corrupt intention that Zuma should wield the full weight of the political clout which he carried to bring about the desired result, and that such an intention properly fell within the direct scope of the corruption charge on count 1.”
This paragraph is a summary of findings in the criminal judgement, in turn based on the 13Â 000-page record of evidence as analysed by the appeal court.
Of course, Zuma was not an accused in this case. It would clearly be best for the nation if he had his fair day in court. But insofar as Shaik was concerned, the court, on the evidence, found that he paid Zuma so the latter would use his power to perform acts that would be for the financial benefit of Shaik. Viewed from Shaik’s perspective, how would the critics of the court describe that relationship?