Consider the term perduellion. It means more or less the same thing as perfidy, its etymological cousin, but it survives in English in specific reference to the crime of high treason.
Perdition, another relative via Latin, is the irrevocable ruin that awaits those who commit heinous crimes against the state.
These dark ideas emerge because the South African state is undeniably in peril. Its body politic and its institutions, its customs and its law, its resources, its honour, its sovereignty and security, and everything else to which the country’s citizens owe allegiance, are being subverted. It means the republic could well be a crime scene entire, so we must tread carefully lest we contaminate the evidence against the day of reckoning.
The crime of high treason, however, is obsolete in SA, where we no longer owe allegiance to a monarch as the embodiment of the state. Treason, on the other hand, can occur in a democracy where citizens constitute the state and in which its constitution is the highest authority. In that sense, common or garden treason retains much of the meaning intended with perduellion.
SA’s courts offer a definition that enumerates options of hostile intent against the state, each of which may constitute treason.
Among these, we may dismiss the intent to overthrow the state for the moment for lack of evidence; whatever it is the student protesters think they are doing, it is not exactly seditious. Instead, we need to determine whether the act of state capture (or attempted state capture) either impairs, violates or threatens the integrity of the Constitution and the sovereignty of the state, alternatively, whether the government has gathered rebellion against the state.
The ANC government’s decision to withdraw the South African state from the International Criminal Court, for instance, demonstrates the government’s hostile intent towards the Constitution and towards Parliament. This is the Parliament that enacted the implementation of the Rome Statute in SA.
It is but one example in which the government is dragging the state and its violated citizens through endless rounds of administrative fiat and litigation. But it is a good example. It shows intent and the guilty mind, and it reveals the chain of command.
Motive is clear too, which brings us to the suspects. As SA’s transition from democracy to jackboot state develops, President Jacob Zuma will be contemplating his day in the International Criminal Court after the whole thing has unravelled, to liberally paraphrase BusinessLive editor Ray Hartley. This makes Zuma a prime suspect, but for all his peccadilloes he is not alone.
He may not even have given the orders, but merely relayed them as a kind of messenger chappie.
With Zuma, we may want to list the Gupta family and the ministers and officials who have obeyed wrongful and seditious orders, and those agencies that threaten the Treasury.
Still the line-up would be incomplete. In the interest of justice and under the doctrine of common purpose, every member of the ANC who has through their actions and inactions permitted the subversion of the state by the governing party must be equally indicted with perduellion. The ANC’s subversion of the state began with the arms deal and it seems it may never end. The estimated cost of corruption to the economy varies greatly, so we cannot fix it on R30bn a year (using global civil society organisation Transparency International’s conservative formula), but we do know it is a threat to the state.
That alone is sufficient to formulate a charge of treason in which the main accused is the ANC. What the party members must do now is to take actions that may mitigate their transgressions. Recalling Zuma is a good place to start.
The forgiving, understanding and humane people of SA may take it into consideration when sentence is passed. ANC, throw yourselves on their mercy.
Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.