This week the EFF took to the Constitutional Court to revive the Phala Phala saga, which lingers as a point of confusion for most citizens.
This approach to the courts is based on what the EFF and other political parties regard as a failure by the then-ANC dominated parliament to hold an exhaustive inquiry into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s version of what happened at his game farm. By blocking that motion, the ANC is accused of having reverted to its old habits of neutering parliament by leveraging its majority to kill accountability.
Ever since Arthur Fraser dropped the bombshell about a robbery at Ramaphosa’s farm in 2020, various state institutions have tackled the matter in line with their varying mandates, and provided some form of feedback to the public. It has become increasingly obvious that SA’s accountability mechanisms in relation to financial crimes and transgressions require serious revisions if they are to enable South Africans to understand the mechanics of the series of transactions that led to Phala Phala.
The public interest in the matter requires no emphasising, but a crucial part of the case is that it emerged in the same political season when SA’s financial accountability ecosystems were found deficient enough for the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to place the country on its greylist.
That represented the cumulative failures of institutions and regulations that ought to have been able to vouch for the flows of cash and similar resources within the country’s borders, institutions and systems.
When a country cannot do so at at a time when terrorism financing and money laundering continue to compromise the financial system as a whole, it invites the sort of decisive actions that should have been initiated long before the FATF declared that we have a problem.
While the National Treasury and other role players have been scrambling to fix a broken system through a raft of bills and deliberations, the spanner in works was the realisation the president himself was associated with a transaction that benefited from the lack of comprehensive accountability.
The case before the Constitutional Court seeks to bring a political argument to the judicial process that the judiciary has no business resolving on behalf of politicians.
As head of state, Ramaphosa should be intimately committed to ensuring SA does everything to fix the accountability gaps that led to the greylisting.
Institutions such as the Reserve Bank, the SA Revenue Service and the public protector all gravitated towards a conclusion along the lines that “we are all mandated to see some parts of the picture and everything else belongs somewhere else and hence we cannot reach a conclusion on what Phala Phala is all about”.
Cop out
While that may be regarded as a cop out by ordinary citizens, it is quite obvious that those with the power to intervene by creating laws that are fit for purpose, should be using this as a learning moment and test case for how our systems might comprehensively deal with another Phala Phala.
Instead, we have a long-delayed theft case that is meandering through the courts and will provide little detail about how the dollars came to be in that couch at Phala Phala, rather than how they were stolen.
The case before the Constitutional Court seeks to bring a political argument to the judicial process that the judiciary has no business resolving on behalf of politicians.
When one considers the scrutiny of institutions such as the FATF and the curious confusion of the public regarding this particular transaction, it is frustrating but perhaps not surprising we are once again tinkering with, rather than creating, a stronger framework that might hold even the incumbent of the highest office to account for a truly strange turn of events, regardless of who first informed us about it.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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