A top official from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has warned that the African National Congress will not hesitate to ”kill” the Scorpions if they continued to pursue ANC president Jacob Zuma, the Sowetan newspaper reported on Monday.
The report quoted Cosatu’s KwaZulu-Natal secretary general Zet Luzipho as saying: ”If the Scorpions bite the wrong people we will kill them. Like a dog when it starts biting relatives at your home. You get rid of it. We will do the same to the Scorpions.”
Luzipho’s statements followed the protests held throughout Durban on Friday when members of the ANC’s eThwkweni region staged protests at 16 police stations throughout Durban to demand that criminal charges against Zuma be dropped.
Zuma faces a charge of racketeering, four charges of corruption, a charge of money laundering and 12 charges of fraud related to a multibillion-rand arms government arms deal. Zuma was charged in 2005 but that case was struck from the role in 2006. He was re-charged in December 2007.
The two Thint companies — Thint Holding (Southern Africa) and Thint — are the South African subsidiaries of the French arms manufacturing giant Thales International (formerly Thomson-CFS). Each company faces a charge of racketeering and two counts of corruption.
Meanwhile, it merged last week that businessman Hugh Glenister would be seeking an urgent high court interdict to bar Travelgate MPs from debating the future of the Scorpions.
He said at a Cape Town Press Club lunch on Tuesday that his lawyers were hoping to go to court to argue the matter next week.
The application would seek to have ”220 members, if not more”, disqualified on the grounds of conflict of interest from voting the Scorpions out of existence.
Glenister is currently waiting for the outcome of a Constitutional Court hearing on his challenge to government plans to disband the unit.
His attorney, Kevin Louis, sent a letter to National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete on August 14 asking that MPs who had been investigated by the Scorpions in the Travelgate matter recuse themselves from consideration of the two Bills that seek to shut down the unit.
Louis sent a second letter last week, saying Glenister would institute an urgent application for an interdict if there was no reply by August 22.
The speaker’s office responded on Tuesday afternoon, rejecting Glenister’s demands.
It sent the lawyers a copy of a letter on the same issue that Mbete sent to the Grahamstown-based Public Service Accountability Monitor at the beginning of August.
In that letter, Mbete said: ”The parliamentary system has inbuilt measures for ensuring that individual members’ feelings cannot compromise public interest and I believe in the system. – Sapa