Last Friday Jacob Zuma walked in and out prison in the same time some people use to take a shower. According to our minister of correctional services, Ronald Lamola, he was booked in and then immediately considered for a remission of sentence and released.
This article is not about whether Jacob Zuma should be kept in a jail cell or not. It is about the rule of law. It is also about a repeat offence in which the ANC government insults the intelligence of South Africans.
Two things are plain.
First, the ANC does not have the political appetite to send him or any other senior party figure to prison, now and in the future. Doing so will introduce strains into the party that may put an end to its dominance, if not existence.
Over the years, countless senior ANC figures have been implicated in corruption in various forums, including the Zondo commission. They have not yet been charged. They will never be charged, not as long as the ANC is in power.
Some are not so senior but sufficiently connected to senior party figures to raise the possibility of seriously implicating them in evidence at trial. And so these cases are put on the slow burner, investigated by hapless police officers with neither the skill, experience or resources.
When I was at the Financial Mail in 2013, a senior Treasury official told me to watch a pattern that would precede the 2014 national and provincial elections. Department and municipal officials would be suspended, he told me, so that the people who act in their stead may approve inflated contracts that are used to fund the ANC’s election campaign.
That pattern of behaviour continues to this day. It is partly for this reason that there has been so much instability in hung municipalities. The political power is crucial because certain people have to be placed in municipal portfolios that have large procurement budgets. Should they encounter resistance from municipal officials, those individuals will be suspended on trumped up charges, or entire boards of agencies dissolved.
There is no universe in which any ANC president will ensure that corruption involving senior party figures will be investigated and prosecuted as a matter of priority.
So what does this have to do with Jacob Zuma and his two minute non-incarceration last week? It’s simple, why must he go to prison for anything when thousands of his comrades steal daily and are not held accountable? I would also be as upset as he is.
Litigating Jacob Zuma’s incarceration is a pointless exercise. There are simply too many Zumas out there to worry so much about just one, as if litigation can hold them accountable one at a time. Luthuli House and the national and provincial cabinets are infested with them, as are municipal councils.
They are brazen, entitled, petulant and indescribably arrogant.
It is not possible to eradicate corruption when doing so will decimate the upper echelons of the governing party and leave it rudderless. There is no universe in which any ANC president will ensure that corruption involving senior party figures will be investigated and prosecuted as a matter of priority.
Second, the ANC has become so accustomed to insulting the intelligence of South Africans that it now does it live on national television. Lamola and his national prisons commissioner cannot answer simple questions, such as whether any other prisoners were beneficiaries of this presidential generosity. The reason he cannot is because none was, and it will take months before all 9,000 are released.
What we have here is not a case of first in and first out, but last in, first out. One has to be painfully naive to believe the entire choreography was a mere coincidence, yet Lamola and his staff are trying to convince South Africans that this is so.
The IFP, demonstrating the ability to rub two brain cells together in ways that Lamola, his government and his party do not imagine South Africans are capable of, summed up this farce in one sentence. It called it “a balance between law and politics”. Lamola knows this to be true, but the inherent lawlessness of the entire exercise forces him to insult the public’s intelligence instead. Telling the truth will send him straight back to court.
It is not possible to build a culture of political accountability through litigation. The courts are littered with such judgments, but the behaviour continues because the ANC does not believe voters care. Alternately, it believes them to be so stupid or ignorant that it can prioritise the interests of its malcontents over good governance.
In a democracy, when a governing party no longer respects the citizens whose power it holds in trust, citizens must remove it and replace it with one that will respect the rule of law. Only an election delivers such an outcome, and there is one coming up next year.
We all have a very simple choice: be insulted on national television on a regular basis, or place in power people who will treat citizens with respect and seriousness.
In that context, it really matters very little whether Jacob Zuma is in prison for contempt of court or not. The ANC is the bigger fish for South Africans to fry, and when they do, insults like last Friday will no longer happen.
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