EFF says Zuma must pay up twice for wasting courts’ time

Former president Jacob Zuma’s latest bid to slither out of the personal costs order the North Gauteng High Court
slapped him with over his failed review of former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report, could end up backfiring if the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) get their way.

Zuma has now taken his fight to the Constitutional Court, where he’s launched yet another application for leave to appeal.

The High Court refused him as much in 2018, as did the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) last year.

Zuma says they got it wrong and he was “acting as the President” when he decided to take the report on review. But the EFF says his “hopeless” case should be thrown out and that the former president should be punished for abusing the court process – with another costs order.

“This application is yet another attempt to abuse the court process to escape accountability. Only this court can bring this abuse to an end,” the party, through its lawyers, said in papers filed in response to the Constitutional Court application.

The High Court ordered Zuma to dig into his own pockets to cover the costs of the case, after finding he had had
“no justifiable basis to launch the review application in the circumstances”.

“In doing so he was reckless and acted unreasonably,” it found.

But the former president in his papers before the Constitutional Court maintained his review of the report involved what he considered “an important constitutional issue that needed certainty” – that of whether Madonsela was acting within the scope of her powers when she recommended the chief justice – as opposed to the president – select a judge to chair a commission of inquiry.

“As president, I was concerned at establishing a commission of inquiry in a manner that is not consistent with the constitution and the applicable legislation,” he said.

He dismissed the High Court’s findings to the effect that the application was, as he put it, an attempt to “block investigations into corruption which implicated me” and labelled them baseless.

The EFF, however, said the High Court had been spot on.

“[He], as President, pursued personal ends despite his best efforts to try and to bring his initial review application within the authority of the office he previously occupied,” Angelike Charalambous, of Ian Levitt Attorneys, said
in an affidavit deposed to on behalf of the party.

Charalambous urged the Constitutional Court to scrap the case and to follow the High Court’s lead and make another costs order against Zuma.

“[He] is only concerned by the pecuniary consequences that will befall him personally as a result of the [High] Court’s order. While this Court may feel some sympathy for [him], that sympathy alone is not enough that he should be granted leave to appeal. That sympathy should not immunise him from a punitive costs order on the attorney-and-client scale now,” she said.

“This is yet another iteration of the same doomed legal strategy which has already been rejected with the contempt it deserves”.

The Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (Casac) is also opposing the application and like the EFF, wants it dismissed with costs.

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