By: Clyde Ramalaine
Democracy, we are told, ” is a government by the people in which the supreme power is versed in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. A constitutional democracy is defined as ” a system of government in which political authority, the power of government, is defined, limited and distributed by a body of fundamental law called the constitution. The authority of the majority is limited by legal and institutional Men’s so that the rights of individuals and minorities are respected.”
Since 2016, a campaign designed by unscrupulous, some bitter from 2007, factional ANC politicians and expressions has been peddling this sophism that the constitution of SA is under threat. This campaign has mutated similar to the COVID – 19 virus in variants of names but it’s the same group that every year just come under a new banner.
Yesterday, another strand of the ANTI- ZUMA Campaign gathered to release a press statement. How do we know it’s the same crowd while they each time may assume different labels; their target is and remains in horse-bridled sense always the same individual in the person of former President Jacob G Zuma. This time News-24 describes them as, a group, representing an array of organisations. They went to Constitutional Hill not accidentally but in full intent of pressurising the Constitutional Court to sanction Zuma.
Again, this retouched group of however defined South-Africans often assuming their liberation struggle contributions are more sacrosanct, somehow of more significance and necessarily more important than that of other fellow South Africans periodically gather to flame this dead fire of constitutional crisis. At a political level, they would forgive us to now accept they are trying hard to be relevant in a form of self-arrogated authority from the opulent lifestyles and solid bank balances. Meaning the name of Zuma constitutes as I long advance an economy from which some seeks to be relevant when time and space long declared them defunct. This group often arrogate a right to speak on behalf of the masses as we saw with the letter addressed to President Zuma back in 2016. A letter penned by the late Ahmed Kathrada sought to blackmail Zuma into resigning because as his letter ends ” the people have spoken”.
The group comprising ‘struggle veterans’, religious leaders, civil society organisations, business, worker unions, retired judges and former politicians or maybe the mob often dressed up in kaftans of high morality makes up to large extent former civil servants, they at one point were 101 veterans which I long dubbed 101 Dalmatians Bitter Puppies who during Zuma’s term wanted to direct elected ANC leadership from the vestiges of their enlarged views of their importance. They morphed into the misfit of a SAVE-SA campaign duly underwritten in a white high heeled and monied agenda. Then they have the SACC as the face other times it’s a few academics as we saw with the claims of state capture. You can’t but see them as black faces used by a white agenda.
Claims that there is a constitutional crisis are wholly misplaced and necessarily self-serving in a designed agenda. They come inspired by a yet to be unravelled obsession with former President Zuma rather than concerts about constitutionalism. For instance, former President Zuma points to certain concerns about the judiciary, which should concern the SACC, but they focus on his expression of this concern to support their claims that there’s a crisis. Zuma has not defied or made it impossible to sanction him but has simply indicated that he’d rather face that sanction for contempt. Accordingly, to claim that there’s a constitutional crisis are not only hyperbolic but also disingenuous.
To prove my point my point on the questionable identity of this group as sincere in their efforts to protect South Africa and its citizens I ask the following simple questions:
- When and where have you ever heard this embedded and economically well-taken care group convene to speak up about the true suffering of the people and arise in mass action to work for it?
- Where is the evidence of them convening sessions and meetings and press conferences to challenge this current ANC for its undeniable lack of implementing its own adopted necessary radical economic transformation policies that earmarked to meaningfully transform the lives of the masses??
- Where is their so-called custodian role to call out white monopoly capital for its perpetual withholding of much needed investment to a country that made them super-wealthy?
- Where has this attention-seeking group ever convened to condemn the Ramaphosa led administration for the scandalous R500bn PPE and subsequent vaccine bungling ?
- Why does it not concern this group that we have unemployment at 42% and the economy untransformed?
- Why does it not bother this group that we are more than an unequal society in which a apartheid false white identity remains the signpost of wealth and black that of poverty
- Why does it not concern this group that 90% of the companies that benefitted from COVID relief as facilitated by the State albeit actioned by the major banks are white?
- It does not bother them that 4- 5 white owned companies het annually billions from Eskom as tender beneficiaries? In fact they do not remotely question the price of coal that Eskom pays to friends of theirs who own these entities.
- Where is its press statement on load-shedding the curse of abuse by a lack of proper management at Eskom when it is raped by their friends?
You guess right nowhere because their primary objective and target have always been the persona of Zuma.
In typical American stuck thinking, they always need an enemy to point to, Zuma for them constitutes that natural enemy, regardless of whether Zuma exercises his rights within the predictive prescripts of the constitution. They are fanatically obsessed to see him in prison even if he exercises his constitutional rights to protest by way of the courts and has hitherto subjected himself to every court he was demanded to attend.
This group that always have the same people from clerics, academics, some ANC so-called aristocracy surname bearers and a few businesspeople continues to seek relevance when they have dismally failed the black masses of South Africa who until today struggle to have the promised better life. It’s also the same characters in this soapie of an apparent moral claim of Constitutional Crisis. These have all benefitted grossly from their time of serving and are still hungry to want more. They all have been financially drying cleaned by white monopoly capital and feeds from their handouts of the Rupert’s whom they now before.
This group is at it again, they claim to be defenders of the SA ‘constitution’ yet we see them for who they are – nothing but ANC factional attention seekers pretending they uniquely morally sound above reproach and necessarily the meridian of integrity. One cannot help noticing the claim of constitutional threat is always subtly driven by the unspoken white interest agenda in which black faces are contracted to speak based on their apparent significant status of liberation struggle roles.
Let us then attempt to appreciate the claim of defence of a constitution. What is the constitution of SA and why does it detain such a fragile identity that it needs at every turn defence from suspects who claim it under threat.
The Constitution of SA no different to any others anywhere is a document that attempts to define meaningful life in and adopted the space of a preferred governance system of democracy. The constitution by itself is not standing in a vacuum but is a living document that ought to be perpetually shaped and reshaped as we sojourn in democracy. It is the framework for governance and does not pretend it exhaustive but functional. It does not belong to a group pr tribe though I would postulate it is reasonably abused to ensure the denotative of white identity is safeguarded at all times. It appears the defence of the constitution and democracy is only measurable or best expressed in the opposite of Zuma a politician.
The so-called self-appointed defenders of the SA constitution and by extension, our democracy firstly engages in lies. They lie as to how fragile this constitution portends, they lie as to who are the enemies of the constitution they fundamentally lie as to their unique role and status as the last line of defence for the democracy.
In this season they enter our discourse in selling us again a lie. They sell this sophism that Zuma’s refusal to appear before the person of Zondo, not the Commission naturally constitute a constitutional crisis. There is no crisis! What they deceive South Africans in is the fact that Zuma’s refusal to appear before Zondo as chair of the Commission has more than legal merit. They don’t regard his pending case in the high court that is still to adjudicate and pronounce. They refuse to appreciate that the commission jumped the gun to go to the CC and the CC should never have entertained this case since the necessary infrastructure as detailed in the Commission’s Act provided for means to deal with any recalcitrant witness. They lie about the fact that Zuma never said he won’t subject himself to the ruling of the CC, should it decide to imprison him. Meaning what constitutional crisis can there be when the perpetrator says I’m willing to go to jail if and when the CC determines that. What it means in a simple sense is now that the Commission submitted their heads of argument to the CC has to find its time rule to give earlier to its earlier decision. What constitutional crisis I ask again?
Perhaps the most unpardonable sin in lying this group and whoever backs them commits omit is them not telling SA if Zuma goes to jail there will be a political crisis for their faction immanent in Ramaphosa. The only crisis we will have is when Jacob Zuma is arrested and send to prison because at that time we will go back to a pre- 1994 era since this group and its handlers grossly underestimate what anarchy it would unleash. The facts are a constitutional crisis is only possible in this regard where Zuma makes it impossible for him to be sanctioned by the Constitutional Court. There is simply no evidence to suggest he hitherto has made either attempted to make his sanction impossible. The truth is Zuma has said in the instance where the Court sanctions him we will not resist but allow the law to take its cause even if it’s a jail sentence. Where then is this constitutional crisis except in the hollowness of a deceptive campaign that has at the aim of duping us into trusting their lies.
Should we not wonder why we have the failings of the 1994 Project serialized in a national SOAPIE, the State of Capture Commission alias the Zondo Commission? Is this how we are made viewers of our national drama through the ‘actors’ of commission instead of participants in it? Are we rendered shackled by the ones [these groups] who in self-interest seek to pretend a self-appointed custodianship of democracy and constitution, from the historic toolbox of liberation struggle contributions, claim, while they are the signpost of our economic liberation benefit and who today who lacks accountability to engage the critical issues this society is confronted perplexed with? Issues that details the failed economy for the masses, the challenge of a resurgence of white power who today literally can run parallel state institutions if we accept that for one police officer in the State’s employ there are four trained security officers in private spaces. Pertinent issues of free education, primary health care, a living wage for the black masses that today are subjected to more than agony. Yes, as alluded to earlier this group does not speak up against the fact that 90% of the companies that benefitted from COVID relief funds as facilitated through the banks are white. They are immune to ask questions – yet they will expand energy to accuse Zuma of a constitutional crisis where there is absolutely none.
So, stop the lies, claim no easy victories there is no constitutional crisis in SA there is only a looming political crisis that will scupper the prominent and very present white agenda. This group is nothing but a proverbial noise-making Zuma obsessed chihuahua group who think they can blackmail us with their recited apartheid jail, poison experience, jail sentences, having participated in the drafting of the constitution and where the majority of them later held senior government positions. Let us remind this lusty bunch, our freedom was never cheap and we will not sit idle any longer to hear them prognosticating sophisms from their self-elevated statuses. We all bear the marks of the brutality of a heretic twin colonial and apartheid system which did not start in 1820, with British Settlers, or 1948, in the Boer Apartheid system, but with the first attempt of Europeans as far back as 1483. We will not be fooled to trust this hydra of groups because they are ensnared and held carceral to entitlement and the factional politics of the stomach that defines the ANC.
