Umm Muhammed Umar

Former President Jacob Zuma’s medical parole saga continues. On Monday his legal team attempted to overturn, in the Supreme Court of Appeal, the court ruling that the decision by former prison boss, Arthur Fraser, to grant him medical parole, was, in fact, unlawful. Gauteng High Court Judge, Elias Matojane, made the ruling last December. However, he also granted, former President Zuma and the National Correctional Services Commissioner leave to appeal the ruling itself. Radio Islam spoke to the Institute of Race Relations’, Gabriel Crouse.

The IRR made representations to the SCA, as a friend of the court. Crouse said, “what the court had already heard, and decided, at the High Court level, was that there was this battle, as if Zuma was a baby. Is Zuma the Commissioner’s baby? Arthur Fraser? Or the medical parole board’s baby. Who gets to decide what happens with Zuma?” he explained, “Because the medical parole board said, “No medical parole for Zuma”, but the Commissioner said, “No, you must give him parole”. What we’re saying is he’s neither of their baby. He’s the courts baby.” He said that this was because Zuma had been found guilty of contempt of court. Crouse said, “Remember how this began is that the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, said to the former president, the former highest executive in the land, that “you have to go and testify about the highest crime of our times – State Capture.” He said that Zuma had been given an order by the court, and he had disobeyed that order. Crouse said that in Contempt of Court, the court would be the injured party, but the court would also be the judge. He said, “Usually the injured party and the judge can never be the same. Only for the very special circumstance where what you’re doing is disobeying the court order or you’re directly insulting the court, do you get the special kind of category called contempt of court.”

He said, “When you perform such an action, you stay inside the court’s custody. It can leave you in the hands of the prison guards but you stay in the court’s custody, because what the court is trying to do is to send a message to society that you cannot disobey the court order.” He added that while this special category sounded like detention without trial, as would often happen during the apartheid era, Zuma had manipulated the situation, and allegedly thus triggered the July 2021 riots. Crouse said, “When he was first found guilty of contempt of court, there was no leg for him to stand on morally. But what he said was: “This is a special kind of thing. I didn’t get the usual right to an appeal. I didn’t get the usual right to cross examine witnesses. So that means that didn’t get a proper trial. Now I’m getting detention. That means I’ve got detention without trial. Apartheid is happening all over again.”” He added that the Institute of Race Relations had had to step in as the oldest think tank in South Africa. Crouse said that the Institute of Race Relations had always shown up in terms of exposing detention without trial, as that violated its core value of classical liberalism, which meant protecting individual freedom. He said that Zuma was abusing the memory of detention without trial, and that the public was falling for it as they were not aware of the special category of contempt cases.

President Zuma’s legal representative, Dali Mpofu had argued that it would be ‘draconian’ for Zuma to be ordered to serve an additional 10 months under parole, which he contended would be the effect of a ruling that his time on medical parole did not count as part of his sentence. Crouse said that what Mpofu was trying to say was that serving time in prison was the same as serving time outside of prison. Crouse said that that was not so. He said, “when you are let out on parole, you’re still a little bit under supervision, you still have a black mark against your name, and so, it’s not complete freedom, but it’s clearly lightyears away from being inside of prison.” He emphasized that a basic principle of justice was that even if a government official did something unlawful, the court had the power to return things to the way they would have been without that unlawful action. He reiterated that the Constitutional Court had already said that the punishment Zuma must suffer for offending the court, and for offending the country, and trying to put himself above the law by disobeying the court order, was 15 months in jail. He said, “That is not the same thing as five minutes in jail, and 15 months at Nkandla.” Crouse added, “So this thing that he’ll be punished twice is a misconstrue.”

South Africans remain concerned about the violent unrest that took place in July of last year, in light of allegations that the unrest took place as a result of Zuma’s incarceration. No one wants to see a repeat of that, but those events should not hold us to ransom. Crouse said, “we need to get to a place where South Africa is not a dry powder keg that’s ready to explode at the flick of a match, and that is going to take serious hard work.” He added, “we need to make sure that we uphold law and order in order to get to the point where we are robustly resilient against any kind of explosion, like the one we saw last year, and that means putting Zuma in jail. If we let Zuma go free, because we think it’s the wrong thing to do in terms of the law, but it’s the right thing to do, because we’re afraid of some terrorists burning down the highways, then, we’re not going to be able to turn the corner from that. It’s just going to go from bad to worse.”