Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
Zuma’s Mauritian trip revisted
The Mail & Guardian reports that the Mauritian prime minister, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, has denied being asked by Jacob Zuma to “intervene” in the African National Congress (ANC) president’s legal fracas on the Indian Ocean island.
No, he didn’t ask me to assist him in his case. We can’t assist him, even had he asked. He came to see me, to call on me when he was here in Mauritius to say, just to tell me … what he was doing, that he wanted to challenge in court and I explained to him that in Mauritius we have a very independent judiciary, that he has to go through the court system and the courts will decide; nothing more than that.
This seems to suggest that my previous post about Mr Zuma’s trip might have been unfair. But when questioned about what prompted Ramgoolam’s comment to the Financial Times that “we don’t intervene”, his director of communication, Dan Callikan, said that Zuma “evoked his judicial problems” and Ramgoolam explained the Mauritian legal system to him.
So Mr Zuma did “evoke” his legal problems but did not directly ask for help. It is unclear why he would evoke his legal problems with the prime minister unless he was hoping that the prime minister might be of some use for him in this legal dealings. The prime minister obviously understood it that way otherwise he would not have felt the need to explain to Mr Zuma that he could not interfere.
At the very least Mr Zuma raised the legal problems with the prime minister and thus placed the prime minister in the difficult position of having to explain that he could not interfere. This is still inappropriate. If I were to bump into the Rector at a party and “evoke” my application for a promotion, it would be improper of me because I would at least subtly trying to gain an unfair and illegal advantage over others.
So, maybe my initial post was not so unfair to Mr Zuma after all but I am sure the good readers of this Blog will correct me if I am wrong.
