SA must defend Zondo’s report so that the judiciary can stay intact

Under different circumstances, South Africa would have celebrated Chief Justice Raymond Zondo’s handover of the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.

Instead, it wasn’t only a damp squib, it almost turned into a farce when rumours started doing the rounds that the postponement of the handover was due to the commission crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s to ensure that there are no legal comebacks from those that are fingered by the report.

The delay didn’t help because the usual suspects still came out guns blazing. Mzwanele Manyi, spokesperson of the Jacob Zuma Foundation, went as far as attacking the chief justice’s competence and integrity: “To say Chief Justice Zondo is unworthy of being called a judge would be a serious understatement … he fails the most basic tests for even the most junior judge.” He even accuses Zondo of “settling personal scores”.

Manyi says these things not only to defend the ex-president, but he is defending himself, too. As head of the Government Communication Information System during Zuma’s term in office, he was fingered in an earlier volume of the report himself as having enabled state capture. And yes, they have threatened to take the report on review, a threat they will definitely carry out.

This should not come as a shock to anyone. The one thing Manyi can be given credit for is his consistency. He has been consistent in standing by his political principal, so consistent that he is the only one who attaches the honorific “His Excellency” to the former president’s surname. It is this exuberance that sometimes blinds Manyi and his ilk to some truths, that there is no winner in a destroyed judiciary – only losers.

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It’s worth remembering that Zuma fought the Zondo commission from even before it was established. He fought the former public protector, Thuli Madonsela, taking her office to court trying to prove that she didn’t have the powers to make the recommendations that she did.

When that failed, he worked tirelessly with other members of his faction to collapse the commission: he accused Zondo of being biased because of a personal matter between them. When that failed, he simply walked out the commission resulting in him being imprisoned for contempt of court. The whole country is still paying dearly for the chaos that followed his resistance to his incarceration.

The attacks on Zondo must not be seen in isolation from the accusations that the highest court in the land is compromised. The allegations that a Constitutional Court judgment against the suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane was leaked via SMS is all part of the same narrative: destroy the only arm of state that was not hollowed out by state capture and paralyse the state.

It is anybody’s guess what the ultimate goal is: collapse the state into chaos and then what?

The final Zondo report came out at a very unfortunate time in that the president who received it has a cloud hanging over his head. Although he can make a few good murmurs about how justice will be pursued, he cannot shout too loudly that he will ensure that the Estina Vrede Dairy Farm victims (some of whom have been murdered) will get justice.

He suffers from a credibility crisis because of his own Farmgate. Which is why the rest of the country must defend the Zondo report so that the judiciary can stay intact and, with it, South Africa.