‘He believes he’s above the law’: Zondo commission criticizes Zuma’s refusal to obey ConCourt’s order

Former President Jacob Zuma on the Zondo commission.

• Following a Constitutional Court ruling against him, former President Jacob Zuma made it clear that he would not appear before the Zondo commission.
• The commission said it would announce further action against Zuma if he did not appear before it on February 15.
• The Secretary of the Commission has been instructed to file a criminal complaint against Zuma for failing to appear from January 18 to 22, 2021.

The Zondo commission has criticized statements by former President Jacob Zuma that he will not obey a summons to appear before the State Capture Investigation.

In a statement Tuesday night, the commission said this act demonstrated that Zuma considered himself “above the law and the Constitution.”

“It should be noted that, although Mr. Zuma refuses to comply with the Constitution and obey the order of the Constitutional Court, on the one hand, he continues to enjoy the benefits that the Constitution grants to all former presidents in terms of their pensions and other benefits paid by taxpayers, ”the commission said.

The secretary of the Commission has been instructed to file a criminal complaint against Zuma for failing to appear from January 18 to 22, 2021.

The statement also spoke of Zuma’s “attacks” on the integrity of Supreme Court Vice President Raymond Zondo, and said that Zondo “will address those attacks in a separate statement.”

Following a ruling by the country’s highest court in favor of the commission, the former president made it clear that he was willing to face a jail term and then appear before the state capture commission to answer questions about his nine years in office.

Challenge

In a six-page statement released Monday, Zuma maintains that his challenge is motivated by the Constitutional Court’s decision that he did not have a general “right to silence” in response to the hundreds of questions the investigation wishes to ask him.

The highest court in the country determined that while Zuma had the privilege of not self-incriminating, he needed to explain why his response could incriminate him in a specific crime in order to exercise it.

Zuma argued that the Constitutional Court “effectively decided that I, as an individual citizen, could no longer expect my basic constitutional rights to be protected and upheld by the country’s Constitution.”

He added:

Constitutional law expert Lawson Naidoo of the South African Council for the Advancement of the Constitution says that Zuma’s attempt to justify his challenge to the investigation is not a defense of what was a “blatant” disregard of the commission, he reported. News24.

“The fact that Zuma did not participate in the Constitutional Court investigation case to compel him to appear and answer questions now prevents him from raising arguments that he could have raised there,” Naidoo said at the time.

“He had the option to present his case there, but decided not to … What he is doing now is nothing more than an open challenge to the investigation.

Zuma is scheduled to appear before the commission on February 15-19. The statement on Tuesday night said: “As already indicated, the order of the Constitutional Court obliges Mr. Zuma to comply with that summons by appearing before the Commission and answering the questions that may be asked.”

The statement also read: “The Commission is concerned that Mr. Zuma’s decision to challenge the Constitutional Court order and the Commission’s subpoena show complete disregard for the rights and interests of South Africans in obtaining comprehensive responses from him to a large amount of evidence on State capture, corruption and fraud that concerns him and other people related to him that are related to his terms as president of the country that they have led in the Commission during the last three years ”.

– Compiled by Kerushun Pillay, Adiel Ismail and Lwandile Bhengu.