Zuma may come up trumps

‘I’ve always wanted my day in court. It is time for South Africans to hear the truth. My silence has always been to keep unity. It is now time.”

The majority of South Africans can correctly guess that these words were said by former president Jacob Zuma.

It would be a struggle for them to guess on which occasion he said them because he has said these words on multiple occasions, albeit with a few variations. On this occasion, he said them just before his appearance in the KwaZulu-Natal High Court in Pitermaritzburg on corruption charges.

Last week, he walked out of the Zondo commission sulking because Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo is not his friend. The significance of the moment was not lost on South Africans. The whole country knew that the former president had just shown the country’s legal system the proverbial middle finger.

But it’s not as though this has not always been coming. The signs have been there but the country refused to see them. The former president’s Stalingrad legal defence strategy of throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the state each time he has to face the music was always going to have a culmination point. And what better declaration of his disregard for the country’s legal system than to walk out on it after frustrating all its efforts to bring him to justice?

The Commission of Inquiry into State Capture is not a court of law and that’s partly the reason he chose to walk out.

There are legal processes to be followed before he can be sanctioned – and that fits in perfectly with his Stalingrad strategy.

On the one hand, his legal team will be in court to challenge Zondo’s ruling on his refusal to recuse himself while, on the other, he will be in court challenging whatever sanctions will be meted out against him for walking out.

Ultimately, Zuma’s defence team has one plan to keep him from being held to account for his role in state capture: collapse the whole thing.

Yes, collapse the Zondo commission before it can issue its report in March 2021. That way, any possible recommendation to charge him as being the central figure in state capture will fall away.

The National Prosecuting Authority can go ahead and charge him on specific charges that have already been testified to, but they would not be able to rely on a report issued by the deputy chief justice of the Constitutional Court. That would be a big win for the Zuma camp.

The former president’s strategy of challenging everything and taking every legal avenue available to him is working. He has managed to avoid giving real testimony at the Zondo commission and is so far managing to stay out of the courts and jail.

South Africa needs to prepare itself for the possibility that the man at the helm at the height of the state capture pillage might outsmart the legal system. Collapsing the commission or getting it tied up in the courts until its mandated period elapses is a very real possibility.

It is important that whatever has come out of the commission thus far is used to pursue legal charges against those involved because the country cannot afford for them to go scot-free.

People cannot simply walk away from accounting for the wrongs they’ve done.

One thing the commission has achieved is exposing the former president for exactly who he is. His bluff has been called. He was lying the whole time. He is scared of his day in court.

Sydney Majoko.

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