Court ‘should not entertain’ Zuma’s ‘abuse’ any longer, says Zondo Commission

The State Capture Commission of Inquiry has shot back at embattled former president Jacob Zuma’s shock eleventh-hour bid to wriggle out of the 15 month jail sentence the Constitutional Court slapped him with, insisting he “simply refuses to comply with orders lawfully issued against him” and that this is his “modus operandi”.

The commission wasn’t pulling any punches in the papers it filed in the KwaZulu-Natal High Court in Pietermaritzburg on Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s hearing on Zuma’s urgent application to try and stay his detention. This pending the outcome of a rescission application he has also lodged in the Constitutional Court.

Commission secretary Itumeleng Mosala in the papers described Zuma’s latest chicanery as “a continuation of the pattern of abuse by [him] of the court process” and argued the courts “should not entertain such abuse any longer”.

Mosala highlighted that Zuma had “persistently and belligerently refused to recognise and engage in the court processes leading up to the order holding him in contempt of court and imposing a sanction of imprisonment”.

“He had various opportunities to assert these rights in courts but either defied or turned them all down,” he said.

In his papers, Zuma argues he was acting on legal advice when he refused to appear at the commission – the genesis of the ongoing legal saga – and when he opted out of participating in court proceedings.

But said Mosala, it was not open to him “to take a deliberate decision to ignore the authority of the courts and decline the opportunity to assert his rights, only to subsequently seek to assert those rights after the conclusion of the proceedings against him”.

He also argued Zuma had “all along challenged the authority of both the commission and the courts in his personal capacity, through the issue of a series of public statements.”

“I deny that [his] approach to the proceedings before the commission and the Constitutional Court was informed only by legal advice which he accepted with no question. The evidence makes clear that [Zuma] himself deliberately sought to undermine the authority of those processes,” charged Mosala.

Of Zuma’s claims that he was effectively being subjected to detention without trial, meanwhile, Mosala was firm he had been offered “multiple opportunities” to put his case before the courts.

“But he has refused on each occasion to do so. At no stage did he seek to have any matter referred to oral evidence, nor did he make any submissions as to the constitutional validity of contempt of court proceedings. Having failed to do so when given the opportunity, [Zuma] cannot now raise these arguments as a poorly disguised attempt to undermine the courts once again,” Mosala said.

The commission argues only the Constitutional Court can stay an order it has handed down, and that “to suggest otherwise would wholly undermine the hierarchy of our court system, as prescribed in the Constitution”.

It also argues rescission applications require that the party should have been unaware of the proceedings, whereas in Zuma’s case – and on his own version – was “fully aware” and elected not to participate in them.

Finally of Zuma’s argument that he’s elderly and suffers from health problems, the commission’s position is that these are matters “he is entitled to raise with the Correctional Services authorities, including in any application that he may make for early parole”.