Correctional services commissioner Makgothi Thobakgale will have a thousand voices whispering and shouting in his ear this week. Many of those voices will tell him to do the right thing and send former president Jacob Zuma, the serial dodger of his day in court, back to prison.
In November last year, the Supreme Court of Appeals ordered that Zuma must return to prison in Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal, to finish his 15-month sentence for contempt of court after he was unlawfully released by his chum Arthur Fraser. He had served just two months. In July the Constitutional Court dismissed Zuma’s application to appeal the SCA judgment, meaning that Thobakgale must now decide.
There will be many this week who have lost their commitment to the rule of law, such as EFF leader Julius Malema, telling Thobakgale to show mercy towards Zuma and let him walk around as though he holds a special type of citizenship that gives him impunity against the law. Many of those whispering and shouting in Thobakgale’s ear will, like Malema, tell him that Zuma has done us all a huge favour by fighting apartheid and that he is a sick old man who should be resting at home.
Malema said in July that Zuma’s health and age complications warranted a pardon. Malema said he would ask President Cyril Ramaphosa to pardon Zuma: “The guy [Zuma] is old; his struggle credentials, his service to the public office and the fact that he served time in prison and the fact that parole on its own does not mean you are free; you continue to serve even from outside. It is enough for you [Ramaphosa] to give him a presidential pardon to avoid the possibility of instability which was experienced in KZN.”
[Correctional services commissioner Makgothi] Thobakgale must do what he would do with any other prisoner. He must send Zuma back to jail.
Thobakgale must make it clear that we are a country of laws. Zuma committed his crime just three years ago. If at his age and with his battery of taxpayer-funded lawyers he could not work out that it is against the law to defy an explicit order of the court to appear before a commission of inquiry, then he is old enough to go to prison. He consciously and deliberately brought it upon himself, trying to game the law to give him special rights. Thobakgale must do what he would do with any other prisoner. He must send Zuma back to jail.
We are told that we must show mercy and compassion towards Zuma. I have not heard one of his acolytes say a word about the fact that Zuma has brought a malicious, unwarranted, fictional, cruel and illegal private prosecution against the journalist Karyn Maughan and prosecutor Billy Downer. The litigation has put these two — a member of the press just doing her job, and a long-standing and upstanding civil servant — under tremendous stress and the unwarranted insults and physical threats of Zuma’s supporters on social media and even at press conferences. Where is Zuma’s own compassion?
Zuma himself has not said a word against these calumnies. Instead, his speeches outside courts and his continued persecution of the two is encouragement to his followers. The motive is simple, of course. To intimidate the media and prosecutors such as Downer into not doing their jobs — and to continue to dodge his day in court to account for his role in the arms deal corruption of the late 1990s.
It does not take a genius to work out that the decision by Fraser, the former head of intelligence during Zuma’s tenure, in 2021 to grant Zuma medical parole after he had served less than two months of a 15-month sentence was unlawful and possibly corrupt. Zuma, we were told then, was on his deathbed. Well, the man is swanning about the country and travelling to Russia like a young buck. He appears singing here and singing there. Terminal disease? Oh please, man. We weren’t born yesterday.
The most dangerous argument for pardoning Zuma or letting him go unpunished is, as Malema says, that we would “avoid the possibility of instability which was experienced in KZN” in 2021.
What country are we living in when we now contemplate bending the rules, when we contemplate subverting our own constitutional principle that we are all equal before the law, because we fear one man and that he could call on his supporters to tip us into war? First, we should all stop and reflect on this argument: are we all in agreement then that Zuma was the cause of the deaths of 354 people in July 2021? If so, then why hasn’t Zuma been arrested and charged for this?
If Zuma does not go back to prison as demanded by the Constitutional Court last month, then a dangerous precedent will have been set: some among us are above the law. That will mean that the constitution is not worth the paper it’s written on. We must not allow that to happen. Not for Zuma, and not for anyone else.
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