Former president Jacob Zuma will leave Estcourt prison next Tuesday to attend court in Pietermaritzburg over four days, and family members, political leaders and supporters are likely to gather outside to show their support.
Judge Piet Koen has told Zuma and the state the matter will proceed in open court on Tuesday. This follows a two-page submission from Zuma, filed on Monday, telling the court his constitutional rights would be prejudiced if his criminal trial were to proceed online.
Advocate Wim Trengove for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) told the court that the case must proceed regardless of the format. Trengove said security services informed the NPA “all reasonable steps” would be taken to ensure a peaceful process.
However, Trengove warned there was no assurance these measures would succeed. “Supporters of the first accused are presently being mobilised on social media to gather in their numbers in Pietermaritzburg on 10 August,” he said.
He suggested it was premature to determine what format should be used if the need for oral evidence arose in the special plea. Zuma has made it clear he intends to call witnesses to support his special plea against state prosecutor Billy Downer.
This week, he mentioned the prospect of using an interpreter in court. This may be a hint that Zuma intends to testify in isiZulu in support of his offensive against Downer.
Zuma has served almost one month of a 15-month sentence for contempt of a Constitutional Court order. Days after his arrest, he appeared virtually in court via video link from prison and achieved a three-week postponement in his trial over alleged kickbacks from the 1990s arms deal.
To date, Zuma has once left jail to attend the funeral of a younger brother Michael, at the family’s homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, on July 21. His four days in court next week will mark his next break from prison time.
It is not yet clear whether he will be temporarily incarcerated in Pietermaritzburg to appear in the high court. Estcourt’s correctional services facility, where 79-year-old Zuma has been held in a medical division, is nearly 100km from the city.
Next week, Koen will preside over Zuma’s shoehorn application for advocate Downer’s recusal from the politically charged corruption case on allegations of bias. He has brought the special plea in terms of section 106(1)(h) of the Criminal Procedure Act (CPA).
The section entitles a criminal suspect to argue for a prosecutor’s recusal on the grounds they have “no title to prosecute”, which means they are not duly authorised to do so. Zuma claims this applies to Downer, but the state has argued that Zuma is using the wrong legal apparatus to remove Downer and, ultimately, have the case scrapped altogether.
The trial within a trial is key to Zuma’s legal chess play: should his plea for Downer’s recusal succeed, Zuma has told the court he will then motivate for acquittal. This would mean all charges against Zuma would be dropped, and he could not be charged in the future for the same alleged crimes.
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