Jacob Zuma misses deadline in Ramaphosa's court bid to interdict private prosecution

Former president Jacob Zuma has missed the deadline to file an answering affidavit in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s urgent application to interdict any further steps in Zuma’s private prosecution against him.

Instead, Zuma’s attorneys said in a letter that Zuma’s legal team was unable to meet the deadline because they were “spending time with their families” over the Christmas period.

The letter, marked urgent and dated January 3, also said Zuma’s counsel had picked up that Ramaphosa’s application was “both fatally defective and/or incomplete” because there was a page of his affidavit missing and because the commissioner of oaths did not state their full name or the place that the affidavit was commissioned.

“In the circumstances, it would be fair to state that there is in fact no application which has been delivered in compliance with the applicable legislation,” said the letter.

Ramaphosa has applied urgently to court to interdict and then set aside the private prosecution, which charges him as “accessory after the fact” in another private prosecution Zuma is bringing against prosecutor Billy Downer and journalist Karyn Maughan over the publication of information in a medical report that was filed in court.

In his application, Ramaphosa said the prosecution, launched the day before the ANC’s elective conference, had no reasonable prospect of success and was launched with an ulterior purpose: to prevent him from standing as a candidate for president of the ANC because of the ANC’s step-aside rule.

Now elected, if the step-aside rule applied to him, “I would also have to step aside from the elected position on account of the pending criminal prosecution. The summonses were also issued to attempt to achieve this purpose ... This is a blatant abuse of process,” said Ramaphosa.

The interdict is the urgent part of the case, pending a decision on the lawfulness of the prosecution to follow in “Part B”. He served his court papers on Zuma the day after Christmas.

Replying to the letter from Zuma’s attorneys, the state attorney said the festive season could not be an excuse not to file an answering affidavit. He said Zuma had been advised from December 18 that if the summons was not withdrawn urgent court proceedings would be launched.

“Between December 26 2022 and January 2, Mr Zuma had approximately seven days to seek counsel and to draft and commission an answering affidavit. Given that these are urgent proceedings, this time period was sufficient,” said the state attorney.

He denied the application was fatally defective. “The founding affidavit was properly commissioned,” he said. A missing page also did not render the application fatally defective, he said. It was “inadvertently left out during transmission”. This was “regretted, but a common mistake in applications of this nature”.

However, the state attorney made an offer to Zuma’s team: That they jointly approach the deputy judge president of the Johannesburg high court to ask him to expedite a hearing in Part B.

In the meantime, said the offer, Zuma would agree to postponing the hearing in the criminal court scheduled for January 19 — “without our client needing to appear in court” — and that the private prosecution would remain postponed “pending the final determination of Part B”.