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2019-07-16 08:58
Jacob Zuma says we have no discernable definition of capture by the state, but that's exactly what the Zondo commission is trying to establish, he writes. Ralph Mathekga.
After the appearance of former President Jacob Zuma at the Zondo commission, there remain some points to clarify about the nature of the ongoing investigation.
Regardless of whether or not Zuma's appearance raises conceptual issues that require special attention, I believe that the Panel will address these issues in the final report.
Zuma disputed the very idea of "state capture", which according to him is conceptually flawed. He maintains that the commission should focus on corruption rather than an impossible idea of state capture. According to Zuma, for the state to be captured, there should be a capture of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.
Zuma did his homework. The capture of the state would imply influencing all these branches of government, as they constitute the state. In our case as a country, it can be said that the legislature and the executive branches of the state have experienced a sinister level of infiltration. The same can not be said of their judicial system.
The judiciary in South Africa was the last line of defense against the consolidation of capture by the state. If the judiciary had not stood firm, he was clearly in a position to take control and capture him. He organized a self-preservation maneuver against the attempted capture. Despite the attacks of some influential politicians, the judges of the courts resisted well to Zuma's efforts to derail the formation of the investigation.
Even before Thuli Madonsela, a former public protector, recommended Zuma to establish a state capture commission, her ability to act in the public interest was routinely questioned by Zuma. the courts, its executive decisions posing serious problems. Zuma's decision regarding the respective NPA (National Prosecuting Authority) leaders is recalled here, where the courts have three times declared that he was mistaken.
The courts ruled that his discredited appointment of Menzi Simelane was "irrational". This was followed by new findings regarding the dismissal of Mxolisi Nxasana and the subsequent appointment of Shaun Abrahams as head of the NPA. In this case, Zuma's decision-making capacity was considered insufficient.
I do not have enough room to list all the cases in which the courts have had to think about the correctness of Zuma's decisions. The courts were not facilitators of state capture. Parliament and the executive share a certain degree of responsibility regarding the possibility of capturing the state, or at least not being able to stop the capture attempt.
The fact that the judiciary was not captured was mentioned by Zuma to conclude that the state capture investigation is premature. The former president would like us to wait for the complete capture of all branches of government, including the judiciary, before we can open an investigation into this. It comes down to finding people who commit a crime and then waiting for them to end the evil acts so that what they do contains all the necessary elements of a crime for better prosecution.
According to Zuma, all elements of state capture must be in place before starting an investigation.
No state capture in law
What also makes Zuma challenge the idea of state capture is the fact that South Africa's criminal law code does not define state capture as a crime. Our laws do not define capture by the state. This brings me to the difficult question of characterizing crime or criminal conduct.
For example, it is generally accepted that a serial killer is a person who kills three or more people over a period of time for phycological purposes. The reason for the murder is very important in determining whether it is a serial killer.
The question is when the existence of great corruption deserves an investigation into the capture of the state. Zuma is ready to admit the existence of great corruption, on which he wishes the investigation to focus. He is not willing to accept that where great corruption exists, the ultimate goal could be to capture the state. Therefore, he is not willing to accept the idea that a grand corruption investigation could identify the capture by the state as the goal of multiple incidents of corruption.
If people were trying to seize the state, but if they were incompetent to fully capture all state organs, that does not mean that a survey of the capture of the state State is an investigation into an impossible idea. Attempting to capture the state is certainly unacceptable, even if the project does not succeed completely.
As a society, we can not ignore an attempted murder simply because the murder did not succeed. We are investigating attempted murder to ensure that we can prevent the murder from occurring in the future.
If the commission concludes that there was no state capture because those who tried were too bad, this investigation would not have been a waste of time. But Zuma seems to know even before the commission has completed its work that there was no state capture. Yes, there may not have been a total capture of the state; however, we must establish this as a fact in the ongoing investigation.
Zuma also says that we have no discernable definition of state capture. I am confident that the committee will address this issue and explain when corruption becomes a state capture. The commission could conclude that there has been state capture orchestrated by Zuma and his badociates. This could indicate that there has been no state capture, but only large-scale corruption incidents by a few or a lot. The badumption of capture by the state can easily be upheld or rejected by the commission on the basis of the evidence presented. Zuma should be rebadured on this one. The evidence must be rigorous and clear.
The main problem of our former President is that he prefers to use vague and abstract statements to rule out all allegations of wrongs committed against him, while deliberately refusing to answer substantive questions about specific incidents, including meetings and meetings. discussions he would have had.
It is not Zuma's general remarks that will help the commission to determine the truth, but its honest answers to specific incidents, meetings and decisions that directly concern it. In the end, it's not his view of the world that matters, but the motivations for his specific decisions.
– Ralph Mathekga is a political badyst and author of When Zuma goes away and Ramaphosa's tour.
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