Cyril Ramaphosa’s farm, Phala Phala. (Leon Sadiki)
The stakes are high in the Economic Freedom Fighter’s (EFF’s) bid to compel the National Assembly to impeach President Cyril Ramaphosa on charges flowing from the theft of foreign currency concealed at his farm.
Impeachment is inevitably a political choice.
Even if the ANC spared Ramaphosa for political reasons, rather than the delicate legal reservations advanced in by his advocates, the EFF’s application has the equally political purpose of cutting short his second term. Ramaphosa tried to take the report of the Ngcobo panel on legal review in December 2022 precisely to future-proof his presidency against attempts like this to revive it.
He was denied direct access, and this week’s observations from the judges about the implausibility of his version of what happened at Phala Phala were a reminder that even if he survives again, he can never escape the stigma of the money hidden in his sofa and his security detail’s outlaw efforts to recover it. But the case raises questions about the parameters of the parliamentary process for removing a sitting president that are worth answering.
Much has been written about the dangers of inviting courts to the terrain of other arms of the state — and the sternest warnings have been written by the judges themselves. The angriest objection came from former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng in the EFF case where the constitutional court ordered parliament to adopt specific rules for impeachment.
Mogoeng dissented from the majority for fear that intervention risked rendering an eventual impeachment process rigid, the same risk that confronts the court today.
The current case is a sign of both the youth of our democracy and of its resilience.
There is caution in the fact the courts are so often asked to intervene, but comfort in the fact that the constitutional space in which they can curb the excesses of the executive remains intact.
Elsewhere in the world, the guardrails of democracy are being dismantled.
US lawmakers are coming face to face with Donald Trump’s contempt for rule-following while the Knesset last year passed a law curtailing Israel’s supreme court’s authority to review the rationality of government and legislative decisions.
This is the same power our courts exercise with restraint in cases like the one argued this week — and a thousand of other review applications launched since the end of apartheid. It must never be stripped away and ironically the populists seeking by any means to oust Ramaphosa, present litigation included, are most likely to attempt just that.