CR17 campaign was never formed to promote illegality, says manager

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lawyer Peter Harris and his former campaign manager Bejani Chauke have welcomed the Constitutional Court judgment on Thursday, saying Ramaphosa was vindicated.

“This ruling confirms that the president was vindicated in every respect by the highest court in the country. The Constitutional Court has found that the Public Protector was wrong, in fact and in law, on every single one of her findings against the president,” Harris said.

Chauke welcomed the Constitutional Court judgment on Thursday and said they wanted to move past the matter.

He said: “It has always been our conviction that the CR17 campaign was never formed to promote unlawful acts or illegality.”

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Justice Chris Jafta ruled that Ramaphosa did not wilfully mislead Parliament, did not personally benefit from the CR17 campaign donations, and that Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane did not have the authority to investigate inter-party campaigns.

“Therefore, the Public Protector was wrong on the facts and the law with regards to the issue whether the president had wilfully misled Parliament and the High Court was right to set aside her finding,” Jafta said.

The court further found that, on the evidence, Ramaphosa did not personally benefit from the donations made to the CR17 campaign.

Jafta said that, more importantly, the Public Protector did not have the authority to investigate this because it did not form part of the complaints received.

“We trust that the country can now refocus its energies to the various vexing challenges we face, as a people,” Chauke said.

Manager for legal services in the office of the Public Protector, Muntu Sithole, said the judgment was essentially premised on the interpretation of the law and facts.

“The defending judgment had the same interpretation to ours, so obviously the majority judgment is the one that binded [sic]. So we’ll have to take what they say going forward in terms of issues dealing with the Executive Members’ Ethics Act,” Sithole said.

The Public Protector’s office said it would take the Constitutional Court ruling as it is and learn from it going forward.

Sithole said the ruling was not a legal setback for the Public Protector’s office.

“I wouldn’t think so because for us, this was a genuine case of coming to the courts for assistance. It was not to come say we have a matter of understanding. We were simply coming here to say ‘Court, we are in dispute, help us understand it properly’. The fact that there’s two – judgments majority and minority – shows that law is always bound to differ on issues,” he said.

Former DA leader Mmusi Maimane, who laid the initial complaint against Ramaphosa, said he had noted the judgment.

Maimane said while the judgment dealt with the nature of the president’s answers in Parliament, it did not change the facts that Ramaphosa received a donation from criminally-accused company Bosasa.

“Given what we know about the modus operandi of Bosasa over the past two decades, we still do not know what benefit Bosasa was expecting in return for these financial contributions. However, the president himself clearly noted the damaging nature of the donation, and offered to pay back the money – a tacit admission that the gift horse from Bosasa was tainted. To date, many questions remain unanswered,” Maimane said.