1. Packing for Perth or just another day in South Africa? Today it’s all about analysing the NPA’s decision to drop the charges against ANC president Jacob Zuma. One of the best comes Tim Cohen who wrote in the Daily Dispatch that the NPA decision shows us that the dream of South Africa having a special claim to the moral highground is dead.
We can claim no special place, no special rights, no special privileges. We are no longer miracle workers, just another grubby participant in the carnival of global politics, subject to base desires, enduring of haughty leaders, ever hopeful of finding just one decent person to carry our banner. Never before has the true nature of the South African State been so obvious, so plainly laid open to public view and so revealing for what it is. Much as we pretend otherwise, the hard truth is we live in a quasi-totalitarian State. And the rules that apply to single-party dominant States apply to us, too, though we pretend they don’t.
2. Veteran investigative hack Sam Sole at the Mail & Guardian has an excellent, insightful piece on the tangled web around the arms deal involving Schabir Shaik and Zuma’s alleged role in it. Was Zuma Shaik’s puppet or a mercenary trying to squeeze as much money as he could out his old struggle buddy? It is well worth a read. Click here.
3. Senior Counsel Paul Hoffman says that the acting NPA head Mokotedi Mpshe’s concession that the prosecution team, led by Billy Downer, remains of the view that any decision in the matter ought to go court has laid the door wide open to civil litigation — including an urgent application for an order interdicting Zuma from accepting nomination for the presidency.
The fundamental error in his reasoning is that he is unable to point to any prejudice in the legal (as against political) sense that Zuma can possibly claim to have suffered as a consequence of being charged after the ANC’s Polokwane conference rather than before it. The subsidiary decision to withdraw charges against Thint (the arms dealer in question) highlights the fallacy in the reasoning of the NPA. Thint was obviously not a candidate at Polokwane and the two-week difference in timing of the arraignment of both accused is therefore neither here nor there .
4. DA leader Helen Zille says on her Facebook page that party “is now finalising its plan to take the matter further through the legal system“.
5. A senior NPA official told The Times’s that the NPA is, in fact, going to prosecute former Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy and former NPA boss Bulelani Ngcuka for violating sections of the NPA Act — rather than recommending an inquiry as indicated by Mpshe. Read the story here. And to throw my two cents in here, suspended police commissioner Jackie Selebi could now escape trial for corruption and defeating the ends of justice on the same basis as Zuma (because there was a political conspiracy against him) after being referred to in the transcripts of tapped phone conversation between Ngcuka and McCarthy. If you’ve forgotten what that’s about, click here to read the charge sheet at Financial Mail’s website.
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