EFF leader Julius Malema. (Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema has called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to pardon his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, for his contempt of court conviction for failing to appear before the Zondo commission inquiry into state capture.
Malema said pardoning Zuma would avoid a possible repeat of the July 2021 looting and vandalism that hit parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng and left more than 350 people dead while costing the economy R50 billion in damages. The civil unrest was preceded by protests over Zuma’s jailing for contempt of court.
On Thursday the constitutional court denied the commissioner of correctional services leave to appeal a supreme court of appeal (SCA) ruling that Zuma’s release from prison on medical parole was unlawful.
The court said the application bore “no reasonable prospects of success”.
The SCA held in November last year that the decision by former commissioner Arthur Fraser to grant Zuma medical parole early in his 15-month prison sentence was in breach of the Correctional Services Act and unconstitutional.
Malema expressed his opposition to sending the former president to jail, telling a forum on Friday that “a presidential pardon is proper as we try to mitigate a situation where we are going to violence”.
“We have seen 350 to 400 Africans die in July [2021]. We don’t want a repeat of that and if the president can intervene in the best interests of the country, that is good,” Malema said.
“He [Ramaphosa] is not using the presidential pardon to pardon his auditor or his own lawyer — it is not personal, it is for the country.”
Malema said he had visited Zuma at the time he was “resistant” to appearing before the Zondo commission and in the constitutional court.
“I went to visit and I pleaded with him … and I said, ‘President Zuma, go there and speak to them. I like when you speak off the cuff, go and put your perspective, it doesn’t matter what the decision is’.”
“When the decision [of the court] was made I went to see President Ramaphosa [and said], ‘whatever happens, you may have to give President Zuma a presidential pardon’. I flew a lot of people into this city and out to avoid what was going to happen in July because I knew what was going to happen,” Malema added.
The EFF leader said he had tried to contact Ramaphosa on Thursday in the aftermath of the constitutional court ruling to again plead the case not to jail Zuma.
“I said, ‘we don’t know what is going to be decided by the department of correctional service but the president’s hands are not tied’, and that is what we want to remind him of. We reach a point where we must choose peace over all these types of things we are talking about, to say that ‘no one is above the law and all of that’,” Malema said.
“Zuma has served, it is enough. Why do you still want to burn our country after a person has served,” he said, adding that parole was “another form of sentencing”.
“When you are on parole it doesn’t mean you are free, there are certain conditions,” he said.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, declined to comment on Malema’s suggestion of a presidential pardon for Zuma.