The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Tony Leon on Monday accused President Thabo Mbeki, African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma and Cape Judge President John Hlophe of ”constitutional vandalism”.
Addressing the Mizrachi Organisation in Cape Town, the former DA leader called for a government inclusive of ”all talent” available.
The weekend’s revelations about Hlophe suggested, on the face of it and given the unprecedented and appropriate response of the Constitutional Court bench, that he was a ”sort of constitutional fifth columnist white-anting the twin and imperative notions of judicial independence and the separation of powers”.
”This suggests that sometimes the greatest threats to the survival of key national institutions come from within their own ranks and not from the ‘usual suspects’ outside the institutional corridors of power,” Leon said.
”On two previous occasions, the Judicial Services Commission [JSC] has failed to take decisive action against this erring jurist, whose temperament, at the very least, is more reminiscent of a bull who has run out of china shops rather than the possessor of detached impartiality and the objective even-handedness which are the requisite hallmarks of those entrusted with high judicial office.
”Not that Judge Hlophe, at this critical and fraught moment in South Africa’s democratic history, is the only potential constitutional fifth columnist,” he said.
Mbeki himself, whose aloof detachment as an ”absentee landlord and political autism” had attracted so much outrageous indignation from his suffering citizens, had been revealed as a ”stranger or manipulator of the truth”.
This much emerged during the first round of the Ginwala commission hearings into suspended national prosecutions head Vusi Pikoli.
”But the stain of constitutional vandalism is not unfortunately confined to the national presidency and to a judge president,” Leon said.
”The president-in-waiting, Jacob Zuma, has already been processed through the criminal courts.
”As an indicted accused on four serious charges of corruption, racketeering and tax evasion, we face the spectacle of the next occupant of Tuynhuys and the Union Buildings being in the criminal dock in the morning and being president of the country in the afternoon.
”Quite what signals this will transmit in terms of the rule of law and public accountability remains both bewilderingly unclear and overwhelmingly negative,” he said.
Time of national crisis
One of the reasons for the current malaise and one of the explanations why ”the South African miracle” was fast fading was because of the assumption, since 1994, that the ruling party alone and exclusively possessed the moral high ground based on the purity of its struggle against the evil of apartheid.
There was an assumption, false as the past 14 years had revealed, that the movement that carried the hopes and aspirations of oppressed people would, in government, conduct itself in a morally superior fashion.
Rather, envy, greed, intrigue, suspicion and corruption had jostled and clashed from the outset with the ethics of freedom, rectitude and selflessness — in most cases the former attributes overwhelming the latter.
”But at this time of national crisis and confusion we can outline the seeds for a push-back and a recovery.
”It is encouraging, for example, that the Constitutional Court, including the chief justice, is responsible for reporting the errant Judge Hlophe to the JSC.
”It is also noteworthy that critical voices like Kader Asmal and Pallo Jordan, who for too long ‘went along to get along’ on such national policy blunders from Aids to Zimbabwe, have now recovered their courage to speak out,” Leon said.
”But I do hope that it is now plain for the new leadership of the ANC to see the damage which has been visited on our country by the belief that the ruling party alone possessed the talent and the patriotic impulses to build up our new democracy and to maintain our physical and constitutional infrastructure.
”It is my hope, and there are perhaps some indicators, that the new ANC leadership will pull South Africa back from the brink. They need to cast the net wide.
”Whatever the outcome of next year’s general election, it is my hope that the government, the Cabinet and the upper echelons of the public service will not be confined or limited to one party and dominated by one racial group.
”Our national crisis can only be resolved by ‘a government of all the talents’.
”When merit and public-mindedness, not race and party loyalty, are included in the attributes for appointment to executive office, South Africa can again soar to the place it briefly occupied at home and in the world in 1994,” Leon said. — Sapa