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Is it a check or checkmate for or by Zuma?

As the judgement analysis ensues, the question is, 'Is it a checkmate on Zuma's chess board? Are there still pieces that Zuma needs to move? Are there new platforms that may be used to appeal the judgement in a court of public opinion? A not-like-Sisi-Khampepe jury is out."

In an earlier opinion on the judgement, these questions were asked. A political obituary without the name of the person who died was read with the name Jacob Zuma before the coffin was opened to pay last respects. Celebrations of the rule of law at 'play' were made, and one narrative champagne bottles were popped open. South Africa went into an intellectual comatose; the air of lethargy that took grip of thinkers was blowing at tornado speeds.

 

In his characteristic style, Zuma remains focused on the pieces he's moving, recalling those he's already moved and contemplating his next moves. The constitutional court judge's cognitive arrogance doesn't deter him; he focuses on his ultimate goal, delegitimising the litigation onslaught against him. The demonization of Zuma as a 'constitutional delinquent' by a hired army of reputation mercenaries disguised as analysts blinds an unsuspecting public and erodes the last line of our justice defence system, the Constitutional Court.

 

The saga began when the court granted access for the contempt matter to be heard by it, despite it being a lower court matter with no bearing on the constitutionality of its aspects. The behaviour of the Constitutional Court as an institution revealed cracks in the 'individual desires' of judges to 'settle' the Zuma scores at the expense of justice. Egos and emotions became transacting currencies that governed a created reputation and legacy-breaking market, with Zuma's legacy as the prime commodity on display.

 

The 1947 Commissions Act, in whose legal sense the judges relied, is unambiguous on how issues of contempt of a commission should be dealt with. A shared ignorance of Zuma as a human in the human rights-based state created a case consideration behaviour at gross variance with what was legally prescribed, to the extent that the judgement clutched straws to find justification for doing what was, in essence, irreconcilable with common law principles, and wrong.

 

To learn that the matter of Zondo's recusal from presiding over Zuma was on record at a high court when the Constitutional Court shenanigans and circus were pursued became a classical case study of how a shared dislike for a person can be an opiate to a cognitive elite. The person nodes in the institutional matrix that manufactured an anti-Zuma 'factual matrix' to consolidate a thesis for contempt of a civil case court matter to carry a sentence similar to criminal contempt cases are interesting to observe.

 

In this festival of missteps by an 'arguably angry' and 'politically engaged' judiciary, the judiciary's credibility as an institution of justice leadership is battered. The consensuses that are crafted at dinner table engagements of the cognitive elite of South Africa are manifest in the language and tone carrying the message of the Zuma judgement. Like a school principal reading announcements at a morning devotion assembly, Justice Sisi-Khampepe read more of a riot act than a balanced judgment at that level of legal ideation.

 

As I asked in the first opinion, whose political obituaries are written in this unfolding script? Has Zuma now moved his pieces by filing for a review? Who is being put on notice? As a stick fighter who knows how to fight with the shield as a permanent decoy whose blood is on the floor? 

 

Just thinking allowed.


🤷🏽‍♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela

🤷🏽‍♂️Be English nje

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