Just as, we can reasonably safely assume, President Cyril Ramaphosa was coming out the right side of a Covid-19 infection (we can presume Omicron and that the prez is fully vaccinated and probably boosted too) Gauteng high court judge Keoagile Matojane, sitting in Johannesburg, threw a hand grenade under his bed.
Matojane has ordered former president Jacob Zuma back to prison to complete his sentence for contempt of court in a judgment of quite unexpected brutality but that to me seems also to serve as a message of solidarity with a judiciary under siege from political interference.
What the judgment does is to ask of Ramaphosa the simplest of questions — does the rule of law apply in your SA or not? Yes or no? There will be no fudging now.
Naturally Zuma’s team (Dali Mpofu, losing yet again) filed notice to appeal. Reading Matojane’s judgment, you have to wonder whether they were actually listening. Matojane said that, for Zuma, going back to prison is in no way unfair “as there is no suggestion that he is an innocent party [who] … defied the Zondo commission, the judiciary and the rule of law and is resolute in his refusal to participate in the commission’s proceedings”.
Furthermore, the good judge said, Zuma “continues to attack the Constitutional Court while unlawfully benefiting from a lesser punishment than the Constitutional Court has imposed”. So no, he will turn down leave to appeal, which means Zuma can go to the Supreme Court of Appeal and lose there too. Or he could take his punishment like the man he claims to be and go back to prison now and be out by end-January.
Already his supporters are threatening to put their lives on the line for him. Ramaphosa’s job is to give them an answer they never forget
The threat, of course, is a repeat of the violence that shook KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng after Zuma was first incarcerated, in July. Already his supporters are threatening to put their lives on the line for him. Ramaphosa’s job is to give them an answer they never forget.
Obviously that is easier said than done but unless Zuma does go back to prison, and unless attempts to stoke violent retaliation are met with the full might of the state, SA citizens and the rest of the world will understand that this country is well and truly broken, untrustworthy and probably uninvestable.
Try to imagine, for example, as tensions inevitably rise, the communications between Toyota’s huge plant at Prospecton in Durban and company HQ in Tokyo. Toyota makes the Hilux bakkie, the Hi-Ace taxi, the new Corolla Cross SUV and Fortuner at the plant, which employs 7,000 people. The July violence forced Toyota to shut the plant down and to stop exporting, and the company, even after speaking to the eThekwini municipality and the national government, let it be known that the unrest had left it feeling “very uncertain” about the future of its business in Durban.
That is megacompany speak for “one more of those and we’re out of here”. Maybe not SA, but certainly out of Durban, many of whose new municipal leaders were to be seen cavorting with Zuma at his Nkandla spread the other day. They killed a bull in his honour to thank him for getting them re-elected after the ANC’s poor showing in the November local government elections.
Faces reelection
The councillors may worship Zuma but they now have an easy call to make. If Zuma goes back to prison, as he absolutely will have to, do they hit to streets in support of him or do they link arms around the property of their biggest single investor and protect it from harm? Toyota will act ruthlessly if it has to.
Fortunately, neither Zuma nor his supporters are smart. They are quick to anger, insult, threaten and burn. Ramaphosa, simply because he is incapable of acting in any other way, will keep an eye on his political fortunes, above all. Another bout of violence stoked by the Zuma family and Zuma supporters could decisively swing the party around Ramaphosa, who faces reelection as party leader in a year, almost to the day.
He also has only himself to blame for the fact that we do not have a chief justice in place at the moment of what may be yet another constitutional crisis.
But what will worry Ramaphosa are clear signs, spelt out in the Matojane judgment, that the SA National Defence Force medical corps leadership connived actively with attempts to get Zuma out of jail early. Our military is weak but the politics of its leadership are very poorly understood.
While Ramaphosa’s use of the military in the early days of the pandemic may have backfired because some soldiers misbehaved, the fact that he did deploy them would have won him some support. On the other hand, there is deep resentment in the military about their budgets and their inability to maintain or replace equipment.
One thing Ramaphosa will not have to do when he recovers is to put the country into lockdown again. The Omicron variant is generating a fantastically fast spread of infection but it isn’t killing people and it isn’t clogging up hospitals. My guess is that there will be no lockdown, no running folk off the beaches (though I would back a ban on those beaches that are particularly packed on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day) and no banning the sale of alcohol. We will see.
But if Ramaphosa doesn’t have the police and the military on high alert after the Zuma judgment he would be putting the country in jeopardy. So expect a tense, if relatively open, Christmas.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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