Pule appointment fails the test of rationality
The appointment of Dina Pule as minister of social development by President Cyril Ramaphosa is vulnerable to judicial review because it lacks rationality.
Only the Constitutional Court is empowered by the constitution to review the decision as it involves a failure by the president to fulfil his constitutional obligation to appoint ministers to his cabinet in a way that passes the test of rationality.
Jacob Zuma’s appointment of Menzi Simelane as national director of public prosecutions was successfully reviewed in the past. The court noted that while Simelane had no criminal record, his probity and credibility had been the object of adverse findings in the report of the Ginwala commission of inquiry into the fitness for office of Vusi Pikoli, the dismissed predecessor to Simelane. This is how the Constitutional Court viewed the situation:
“The minister and Mr Simelane accept that the ‘executive’ is ‘constrained by the principle that [it] may exercise no power and perform no function beyond that conferred … by law’ and that the power must not be misconstrued. It is also accepted that the decision must be rationally related to the purpose for which the power was conferred.”
With reference to what emerged in the Ginwala commission, the court observed:
“The contradictions [in his evidence] reflect on Mr Simelane’s credibility, integrity, and conscientiousness. They were and remain material. Any decision by any person aware of this evidence to ignore it in the decision-making process involving Mr Simelane’s credibility would have been, on the face of it and in the absence of any explanation from that person, not rationally related to the purpose for which the power was conferred…. The records of the Ginwala commission were, and remain, highly relevant to Mr Simelane’s credibility, honesty, integrity and conscientiousness. The minister’s advice to the president to ignore these matters and to appoint Mr Simelane without more was unfortunate. The material was relevant. The president’s decision to ignore it was of a kind that coloured the rationality of the entire process and thus rendered the ultimate decision irrational.”
Pule, she of the red-soled designer shoes, has an adverse report of the public protector and the opprobrium of the parliamentary ethics committee, which excoriated her malfeasance, to contend with should she be so ill-advised as to argue that the president acted rationally in appointing her.
Paul Hoffman
Accountability Now
The danger of politics built on ‘us and them’
Over the past two weeks, there has been considerable discussion about two public expressions of chauvinism: one about xenophobia associated with the antimigrant protests and the other concerning aspersions cast on the new deputy minister of higher education, Yusuf Cassim, for his religious identity. These are part of the same sociopolitical problem.
Political entrepreneurs in South Africa have long trafficked in a currency of “us and them”; it may be comforting to ascribe this to a fringe of the misinformed and bigoted. But it has been intrinsic to the construction of politics before and after the transition to democracy and is even now practised in the country’s highest offices.
This is the politics of “our people” (as opposed, by implication, to “their people”), which retains the vocabulary of “national groups”, that warns about “enemies”, that muses about “the Indian question”, that complains of the “oversupply” of coloured people in the Western Cape, that questions whether Jewish South Africans are loyal to the country, that stigmatises Muslims as terrorists and that regards commercial farmers as bearers of the country’s original sin. It’s hardly surprising that this mode of politics jumps borders. What begins with political opponents or politically inconvenient minorities is inevitably legitimised for deployment against others.
“We must not be tempted to join those who want us to turn against people who were not born in South Africa and who are in our midst,” President Cyril Ramaphosa cautions. This is sage advice; unfortunately, there is no shortage of those wanting to turn “us” against foreigners and fellow citizens.
Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations
Cape Town must make its pavements walkable
Cape Town holds itself out as a world-class city. In many ways, this is true. However, the city falls short in a specific aspect: many pavements are effectively nonnavigable by foot. Here, Cape Town does not stand up to, say, most European cities.
The reasons are twofold: property owners adjacent to roads allow or actively propagate vegetation to spill onto the sidewalks; alternatively, the city council allows trees and shrubs to take hold on the pavement or fails to provide bridges over culverts and streams. In both cases, pedestrians are forced to walk on the road or cross over to where the other pavement is less impeded.
These obstacles to pedestrians are contrary to by-laws but have developed over many decades as many originally well-laid-out sidewalks have aged. Though not the most serious problem facing Cape Town, the walkability of any city is one determinant of the quality of life of the inhabitants. Perhaps someone in the city will take note.
Willem Cronje
Cape Town
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