The mayor of Cape Town and leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), Helen Zille, is planning to have Judge Nathan Erasmus hauled before the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to see if he should be banned from sitting on the bench following his castigation by the Cape High Court for allowing himself to be used to give credibility to a political tribunal.
Crowing every so slightly about her total vindication by the court, Zille also said that the deputy president of the African National Congress, Kgalema Motlanthe, will be asked to sack his newly appointed aide, Ebrahim Rasool, the former premier of the Western Cape, whose actions in establishing the Erasmus commission were found to be illegal and unconstitutional by the same court.
”In light of the Cape High Court judgement, it is clear that he is unfit for this form of office,” Zille told a press briefing on Wednesday. She softened her remark by altering her prepared text in mid-sentence from ”unfit for any form of office”.
She said that Judge Erasmus has two reasons to answer to the JSC. He compromised himself and the integrity of the judicial system by agreeing to chair the commission in the first place. ”In doing so he disregarded the guidelines accepted by the Constitutional Court to prevent this kind of abuse,” she said.
”Moreover, he acted unlawfully by giving a so-called interim report to Rasool when the commission was about to be reconstituted. This report contained confidential information such as my cellphone records, which had been illegally subpoenaed, and which have, no doubt, now been disseminated in the ANC.”
She said that she has asked Sheila Camerer, the DA member on the JSC, to begin an inquiry through the admittedly vague terms of reference of the commission as to what, if anything, can be done about Erasmus’s conduct.
Further, the mayor, in a fine flurry of table-turning, has asked the public protector to investigate whether the Erasmus commission constituted an abuse of public funds. She suggested that Rasool might be obliged to pay the money back to the provincial purse if that was the case, and added that DA legal advisers are assessing whether Rasool or any other official is personally liable under the Public Finance Management Act.
Finally, she said, DA legislators in the Western Cape parliament are calling on the provincial police commissioner to resign because he allegedly acted illegally in passing on to Rasool information gained in the search of the home of a private investigator.
Pointing out that she has a prima facie case of defamation against Rasool if she chose to pursue it, the DA leader insisted: ”This has nothing to do with a vendetta.”
The Erasmus commission was established by Rasool to examine whether the DA had acted illegally in spying on rogue councillor Badih Chaaban, and when it was found that there was no case to answer, he reconstituted the commission with a broader remit to investigate, as Zille described it, ”a platform for the aggrieved”. — I-Net Bridge