President Cyril Ramaphosa says affidavits from the National Prosecuting Authority and the high court registrar about his private prosecution by former president Jacob Zuma only make his case stronger that it should be set aside.
“It is clear from the affidavits of the director of public prosecutions and the registrar that Mr Zuma is acting unlawfully in attempting to prosecute me. He is abusing the process of the court,” said Ramaphosa in an affidavit filed in the Johannesburg high court on Thursday.
Ramaphosa was responding to affidavits from KwaZulu-Natal director of public prosecutions Elaine Zungu and registrar at the Johannesburg high court Thabiso Maponya in the president’s case to set aside his prosecution by Zuma as unlawful and unconstitutional. Ramaphosa has already obtained an interim interdict against Zuma and now wants to make the interim interdict final, putting an end to the prosecution.
In a separate private prosecution Zuma charged prosecutor Billy Downer and journalist Karyn Maughan, alleging they had breached the National Prosecuting Authority Act when Downer gave Maughan a medical report about him that was later filed in court. Zuma later charged Ramaphosa as an “accessory after the fact” because when he asked Ramaphosa to investigate Ramaphosa failed to act, he alleged.
Zungu was the prosecutions director who issued the nolle prosequi certificates for the Downer/Maughan prosecution, which Zuma later relied on to prosecute Ramaphosa. Maponya’s affidavit was to explain to the court how two summons — requiring Ramaphosa to appear in the criminal dock — were issued.
Ramaphosa said Maponya’s affidavit confirmed that the summons were issued without fulfilling the requirements of the Criminal Procedure Act. The act required that the registrar should consider whether there was a valid nolle prosequi certificate. It was “not a mechanical job”, said Ramaphosa, and required the registrar to apply his or her mind.
Yet Maponya had said the summons had been uploaded electronically and been checked by the registrar’s clerks, who “do not have extensive knowledge of the law as they are neither legal practitioners nor have they studied law”.
The normal routine was that the clerks checked that the court, parties, jurisdiction and other standard information were correctly cited and pressed the “issue”, he said. In this case the summons uploaded by Zuma’s lawyers was “not that different from the normal civil summons that the registrar’s clerks are familiar with”.
It was clear that summons issued contravened the Criminal Procedure Act “and falls to be set aside”, said Ramaphosa.
On Zungu’s affidavit, Ramaphosa said the prosecutions director’s affidavit “fortified” his case that the prosecution is not underpinned by a valid nolle prosequi certificate that relates to him and to a charge against him.
In her affidavit Zungu contradicted the claim by Zuma that Ramaphosa was always a suspect in his private prosecution against Downer and Maughan, saying the claim “defies logic”. Zungu said “at all relevant times” when she was issuing the nolle prosequi certificates, Zuma only referred to two suspects: Downer and Maughan.
She said it was evident Zuma never contemplated Ramaphosa as a suspect because in his statement in support of his criminal complaint against Downer and Maughan he said he had asked Ramaphosa to investigate and had named him “witness No. 2”.
“It is nonsensical that the applicant [Ramaphosa] should be both a witness and an accused,” said Zungu.
Ramaphosa said Zungu’s account “demonstrated that at a factual level it is beyond doubt that no nolle prosequi certificate has been issued … in relation to me”.
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