I came home to live in SA after nearly 20 years in Europe on December 30 1996. For all of life’s turmoil and disappointments, private and public, I have never once regretted it.
Until last Thursday, when I watched as Dali Mpofu and Julius Malema, aided and abetted by the acting chair of the Judicial Service Commission hearings into the appointment of a chief justice, whose name I can’t remember, deliberately and nauseatingly set out to destroy the life and work of judge Dunstan Mlambo.
It was like being punched in the gut. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to leave. What was President Cyril Ramaphosa thinking when, instead of following tradition and nominating his own candidate for the position of chief justice, he asked for four names from a ludicrous public process to find a replacement for the now departed Mogoeng Mogoeng? Ramaphosa knew what would happen to Mlambo. Why do that to him?
Dunstan Mlambo is a husband and a father. What must his wife and children have felt as they watched their husband, their dad, face a barrage of questions about a completely made-up rumour that he had sexually harassed someone? I hear the rumour was invented by two woman judges who wanted Mlambo, a clear favourite for the job ahead of last week’s “interviews”, to fail so judge Mandisa Maya, president of the Supreme Court of Appeal, could get the top job.
I have no evidence, you understand, but apparently that doesn’t matter. Perhaps Mpofu might clear the air. As it was, Maya was the name the JSC recommended. Mpofu and Malema won.
How does that feel? I am sure Maya is a formidable jurist. But she was asked only soft questions and was patronised by Mpofu’s coarse reference to a night they had spent together studying. Mlambo, on the other hand, was slammed up against a wall with the familiar EFF hand at his throat. Explain, they spat, even though there was nothing to explain. They know how to fight, these two. They aren’t there for a debate. Mlambo was tested to the limit and he never flinched. But he must at all costs not be chief justice.
If Ramaphosa, in fact if Maya, allows this recommendation to go ahead unquestioned, they will be completing the assault. Malema and Mpofu’s support will stain Maya’s tenure no matter how good she might be. And Ramaphosa is in trouble whether he supports it or not. Serves him right. Not choosing is a Ramaphosa attribute, but this time he is hoist on his own petard. You can’t simultaneously be a reformer and an appeaser.
By all accounts this is a man guaranteed to win re-election this coming December as leader of the ANC. What is he waiting for? We will see when he delivers his state of the nation address on Thursday evening how much gas he has left in the tank. Does he pull the JSC hearing? Does he take responsibility for the violence and destruction of last July in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng as his rapporteurs lay it at his doorstep? Does he dismiss the national police commissioner or does he wait tremulously for another few years as the police chief fights back through our overloaded courts?
There’s a long list. We know he is an improvement on Jacob Zuma. We get that electricity reforms (breaking up Eskom, allowing private generation), communications reforms (new bandwidth gets auctioned in March) and port reforms (allowing private sector operations within the docks) are coming, but we have no clue that they will matter.
What bothers South Africans is poor physical security and a billowing volcano of unemployed. The economic reforms don’t fix either. The fix is in the leadership. Do we corporatise the ports so we can import more? Clearly not. Government policy is import substitution. To export more then? There are no export “master plans”, no targets. If we were to make a national effort to double our non-minerals exports by value in the next 10 years, how different would government policy have to be?
A lot, I promise, if exports were a single national priority. But there’s no ambition in the Ramaphosa government, just a cautious prodding and tapping to make sure the CR coalition doesn’t fracture more. And then a policy wrinkle here and there. After all, let’s not stop at just one priority. Let’s have lots. That’s bound to work.
Back at the sociopath centre, however, things were going swimmingly. Judge Raymond Zondo withered visibly under the assault, at one stage assuring Malema that “actually, I respect you”. But Malema is oblivious to appeasement.
The chair of the hearings, Maya’s deputy at the Supreme Court of Appeal, was straight out of central casting, playing the judge in a cheap remake of Inherit the Wind. Gimme someone who looks serious but doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, went the cry. He took hours to rule that the sexual inventions thrown at Mlambo might um, er, cough, cough, not quite be appropriate and would be expunged from the record.
Except everyone had already heard it. Central casting guy would be a candidate, obviously, to head up the Supreme Court of Appeal if Ramaphosa bows to Mpofu et al and confirms Maya as the new chief justice. No need for a hearing. He would be just perfect for the part.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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