On Gordhan and Zuma - why the NPA should go after both

When NPA head Shaun Abrahams indicated that it is inconsistent to demand the NPA drop its investigation of Pravin Gordhan, and at the same time demand that it press charges against President Jacob Zuma – he touched on something that has been bothering me for a while.

I similarly think about how I felt about the government’s decision to help Omar al-Bashir escape prosecution. It was politically and possibly economically inconvenient to hand him over to the ICC, but it was our law.

And the net result is we let someone get away from standing trial for genocide, meanwhile Mos Def is stuck in our country because he didn’t have quite the right paperwork. It all seems a bit silly doesn’t it?

We can’t say in that case the government was wrong to let him go, and in the case of Gordhan say that the NPA is wrong to investigate.

Look, we have either got a nation of laws or we don’t, we are either consistent or we’re not.

Now I happen to think that Zuma should face any charges which can be preferred against him, after all the law can have no top or no bottom.

I think Abrahams is wrong to appeal the Supreme Court’s ruling that the NPA was wrong to drop charges against the president.

But because of this I have to also say that if the NPA ends up having to lay charges against Gordhan, if there is evidence of wrongdoing there, as much as I like Gordhan and as much as it would hurt our economy in the short term, it would be the right thing to do.

The law should not be a respecter of markets, because when it is it ends up producing situations like America, where due to a lack of labour law enforcement their poultry workers end up having to wear diapers because they don’t get toilet breaks.

Alternatively you can look at South Africa, and how often we fail to enforce our laws on our biggest businesses.

Environmental regulations are often weakened because it is seen as hurting the economy to enforce them, and the net result is that children risk cancer.

And political motivations are meaningless when it comes to starting the investigation. What is meaningful is whether there is evidence. If the cop is out to get a thief because he slept with the cop’s wife, it doesn’t mean the thief didn’t steal.

Similarly, if the thief is very popular with the people, he’s still stealing. Before all else, the law has to be the law.

Otherwise you end up with a situation where criminality reigns because if the powerful have no need to respect the law, it simply becomes a cudgel to beat the powerless.

When people are above or below the law for whatever reason, justice just becomes another word for tyranny.