FRANKLY SPEAKING | From the arms deal to Phala Phala, our courts stand tall

The Constitutional Court has referred the Phala Phala matter back to parliament. This is good enough reason for hope.

Despite many challenges, the country we are building is holding in some places.

Regardless of the intentions of the political interests in the Phala Phala scandal, our justice system is delivering.

This delivery is forcing parliament to do its job properly.

Once parliament does its job properly, the executive will be compelled to do its job.

If we keep this up, soon enough our politicians will finally learn that they cannot get away with impunity.

They will be convinced that they have a duty to be accountable to the people of SA, and that our system will catch them if they don’t.

The political elite, who populate the executive, have been the main testers and stressors of SA’s systems

The past three decades have tested this country thoroughly.

Its systems have been tested to the limits, no less, by the very people who were at the forefront, in leadership positions.

The political elite, who populate the executive, have been the main testers and stressors of SA’s systems.

These include the economic system, the political system, the legal system, law and order and the social system.

If we are committed to building our country, the data from the past 30 years is invaluable.

It covers all aspects of our society and points out weaknesses throughout our society.

During Thabo Mbeki’s era, parliament was constitutionally obligated to investigate the arms deal and hold the executive to account.

Instead, the ANC squashed the parliamentary investigation by the standing committee on public accounts.

Those were the days when the ANC could simply instruct its members in parliament to tow the line.

The powerful senior politicians implicated in the arms deal scandal included Jacob Zuma, Tony Yengeni, Joe Modise and others, most of whom were ANC leaders.

Parliament failed in its duty, right after the failure of the executive to do its duty.

Parliament failed again to hold Mbeki to account for his escapade with Aids denialism.

This country paid dearly for the failure of the executive to act in a manner that put South African lives first.

Parliament did virtually nothing about the matter, a glaring failure by any standards.

After shielding Zuma from the arms deal scandal, the ANC shielded him again during the Nkandla scandal.

It did its best to rubbish the duties of parliament, making a mockery of parliament and its intended purpose within our society.

By rendering it useless using its parliamentary dominance, it effectively incapacitated the entire system of governance.

So, the failure of the executive under Zuma’s leadership could not be arrested.

Its full damaging effect was absorbed by our society at great cost.

The cost was not merely financial; it was loss of talent, loss of a moral and cultural compass.

It was a loss of the soul of the country.

The entire period of state capture was enabled and encouraged by the failure of parliament to do its job.

Marikana also occurred during the Zuma era. This represented a horrific failure of the government to resolve a labour dispute.

This catastrophic failure, which led to the death of 34 miners, remains a bloody blot of the democratic era.

We thought massacres were a memory of the past, never to be revisited again, only to be rudely awakened by Marikana.

Here too, parliament failed to hold the executive to account.

The arms deal, Marikana and state capture all got commissions of inquiry which produced very little in terms of holding the executive accountable.

This ineffectiveness has damaged the confidence of South Africans in commissions of inquiry.

It is the courts which stood as the last line of defence in these high-profile and immensely damaging failures of the executive and parliament.

It was the North Gauteng High Court which overturned the report of the Seriti Commission, which found no wrongdoing in the arms deal.

It was the Constitutional Court that held Zuma to account for the Nkandla scandal, ordering him to repay money.

It was the Constitutional Court that ordered that Zuma should go to jail for contempt of court for refusing to appear before the Zondo commission.

It is the Constitutional Court which ruled that parliament failed to hold Zuma to account.

It is this same court that has ruled that parliament failed to do due diligence in its handling of the Phala Phala scandal.

Surely, the structural weaknesses unearthed by the Constitutional Court over time must be eliminated this time.

The GNU must earn its stripes.