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The constitutional court on Monday dismissed an application by the ANC for direct leave to appeal a high court order compelling it to submit all records of the decisions of its cade deployment committee for more than a decade to the Democratic Alliance (DA).
“Leave to appeal must be refused as it is not in the interests of justice to hear the matter,” the court said, dismissing the application with costs.
It leaves the ANC less than a week to release the records, in line with a high court ruling handed down a year ago.
The ruling party approached the apex court in September last year in a last ditch attempt to avoid having to do so after the supreme court of appeal dismissed its application for leave to appeal a high court ruling ordering it to hand over the records.
Justices Wendy Hughes and Glenn Goosen held that there was no reasonable prospect that the court would overturn Johannesburg high court Judge Willem Wepener’s order that the ANC hand over all records relating to its cadre deployment committee since 1 January 2013.
This is the date when President Cyril Ramaphosa became chairperson of the committee.
The supreme court of appeal also held that there was no compelling reason it should entertain an appeal in the matter.
Wepener’s ruling in February last year was the culmination of efforts by the DA to obtain the records in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA). It filed its application in 2021, and went to court after the ANC refused to release the records.
Wepener gave the party five days to do so. With no further route of appeal available, the party will now have to comply with the order or risk finding itself in contempt of court.
Leon Schreiber, the DA MP who lodged the PAIA application, said: “The ANC has run out of road and must now expose the secrets it was so desperate to hide.”
Schreiber added that the case was “of historic significance in the ongoing battle against state capture”.
“The records are set to reveal, once and for all, that President Cyril Ramaphosa was personally involved in the state capture project in his capacity as cadre deployment chairman.”
The DA has asked the high court to declare the policy of cadre deployment unconstitutional — judgment is pending — and is expecting the records of the committee to prove in windfall in the run-up to national elections.
Ramaphosa faced uncomfortable questions at the Zondo state capture commission in April 2021 about dubious appointments made while he chaired the committee in his capacity as deputy president.
Ramaphosa testified that in the Zuma era the deployment committee was bypassed regarding a number of appointments at state-owned enterprises, including those of Brian Molefe and Anoj Singh at Eskom and Transnet, and put this down to a “massive systems failure”.
“Certain people were put in certain positions to advance certain agendas as you are investigating now on the capture of some of those entities,” he said. “Some of it was so hidden, so masked, that you just could not see that a certain individual [who] was there was [part of] a particular agenda.”
He listed Molefe and Singh, along with the appointment of the Denel board chaired by Daniel Mantsha and those of Berning Ntlemeza and Shaun Abrahams to lead the Hawks and the National Prosecuting Authority respectively, as examples of appointments made at the behest of then president Jacob Zuma.
He insisted that the committee was not consulted and said Zuma had acknowledged as much and privately offered a “mea culpa” for circumventing it.
Evidence leader Paul Pretorius then put it to the president that since “the evidence is quite strong that there were improper or improperly-motivated appointments”, the deployment committee had every reason to step in and question these.
“It is a fair proposition,” Ramaphosa replied.