EDITORIAL | Legal recourse should not be used to obscure truth

It’s impossible not to notice the irony in the legal and political cloud that hovers over the impeachment saga involving parliament and President Cyril Ramaphosa.

One of the architects of our constitution, complete with its safeguards against tyranny, now stands accused of undermining the very charter that, 30 years ago, offered South Africans a chance to commit to clean, open and transparent government.

This week the impeachment committee — established in terms of parliament’s rules and guided by the constitution — became the target of a legal stratagem designed to stop it in its tracks and pause its inquiry into whether Ramaphosa is guilty of a serious offence and no longer fit to be president. The committee has indicated it will oppose Ramaphosa’s attempt in the high court to interdict and frustrate its work.

The president argues that proceeding now, before his separate court application to review the section 89 report that forms the basis of the committee’s work is heard, will cause him “irreparable harm”. Furthermore, it will render his attempt to have a court review the independent report — produced by a panel headed by retired chief justice Sandile Ngcobo — meaningless. The damage will already have been done, Ramaphosa’s papers argue, and this on the basis of a report he says is “flawed” and based on “hearsay”.

Of course, Ramaphosa, as a free citizen, is entirely at liberty to pursue whatever legal remedy he chooses to protect his reputation, his presidency and the office of the president. But if his claim is that he has done nothing wrong in the matter of the theft of more than $500,000 from a couch at his Phala Phala game farm in Limpopo, the MPs who sit on the committee would be all ears to hear his side of the story.

The country deserves no less than a full and open airing of the facts, including those we may not yet know

He claims the panel that found a prima facie case to answer did not hear his version. But the impeachment committee offers him an opportunity to state his case and present facts that conflict with the report. By adopting tactics not dissimilar to those used by his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa appears to be using the same much-criticised “Stalingrad strategy”, which seeks to drag out proceedings to the point where he has already left office and is beyond the reproach of parliament.

In his endeavour to either stall for time or emerge scot-free, Ramaphosa has the apparent backing of his party, the ANC, whose history with impeachment is far from glorious. One of the reasons we find ourselves in this mess is that the ANC chose to use its majority in the National Assembly to vote against the independent panel report, stopping the impeachment process.

The Constitutional Court, not for the first time, came to the country’s rescue with its landmark judgment giving parliament no say in whether to proceed with impeachment proceedings after the report’s completion. It has to consider the report.

The ANC is now operating in a parliament in which it no longer enjoys a majority, which explains, in part, why MPs are so emboldened by the court’s judgment in pursuing the matter.

Perhaps the high court will see matters differently. In doing so, any judge will be mindful of the fact that the highest court, the Constitutional Court, has expressly ordered parliament to proceed with its impeachment inquiry. The country deserves no less than a full and open airing of the facts, including those we may not yet know. Given the constitution’s spirit of transparency and accountability in government, the attempt to subvert parliament’s purpose, even by legal means, is regrettable.