Ramaphosa court challenge ‘to protect future presidents’

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office has defended his decision to take parliament’s Section 89 panel report on review and seek to halt the impeachment committee, arguing that he is acting to protect the presidency and future presidents.

Speaking at a media briefing on Wednesday, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, said the court action went beyond Ramaphosa as an individual.

He said the president was testing a report whose consequences could lead to the removal of a sitting president from office, a process that should be held to the highest standard.

Magwenya spoke while Ramaphosa’s lawyers were in court arguing his application to interdict the impeachment process pending the finalisation of his review of the Section 89 report.

“What the president is doing here is simply exercising his right. You cannot have a flawed report forming the basis for the removal of a president. It is that simple,” said Magwenya.

He said the judicial review would help ensure that the threshold for removing a sitting president was set much higher and would protect future occupants of the office.

“If we are to be fair and maybe look at these issues beyond President Ramaphosa, it is important that, as a country, we say we want to be assured that the bar at which a president can be removed is one that cannot be questioned because the removal of a president is not a light matter. It is a serious matter. What the president is doing goes beyond just him as a person,” he said.

“It’s an action that, in future, will also protect the institution of the presidency and future presidents by establishing the right standard, both substantively and procedurally, for a process that could lead to the removal of a president. It is as simple as that.”

Magwenya said Ramaphosa was only challenging the Section 89 report into the theft at his Phala Phala farm now because it had no legal consequences in 2022 after the National Assembly voted against adopting it.

He said the report had now been revived by the Constitutional Court judgment, which paved the way for the impeachment committee that could ultimately remove Ramaphosa from office.

“So why did the president not take it on review back then? He has said it before. Once parliament reached the decision it reached, the report had no legal consequence for him as a person or for the institution of the presidency,” said Magwenya.

In what appeared to be a reference to former president Jacob Zuma’s decades-long legal challenges over the 1999 arms deal, Magwenya said Ramaphosa was not seeking to challenge the Phala Phala report indefinitely.

He said the president was simply seeking to review what he believed to be a flawed report and that his legal challenge could not be compared with litigation often described as a Stalingrad strategy.

Although Magwenya did not mention Zuma by name, the KwaZulu-Natal High Court in May criticised Zuma for what it described as a Stalingrad defence aimed solely at delaying his criminal trial.

“Now it’s different following the Constitutional Court judgment and he must, as an exercise of his rights and, as I said, as an exercise in protecting the institution of the presidency, take it on review. And that’s all he’s seeking to do,” said Magwenya.

Magwenya also fielded questions about SA’s increasingly strained relationship with Ghana after recent marches against illegal immigration, which have prompted calls in Ghana for the government to expropriate South African-owned businesses operating there in retaliation.

He said the government was not concerned by those calls but found Ghana’s stance puzzling because there was no evidence that Ghanaians had been specifically targeted during the protests.

“There’s no reason whatsoever that Ghana, for example, would opt for the nationalisation of South African company assets. Number one, there’s no evidence that points to Ghanaian nationals being disproportionately affected by the recent anti-illegal migration protests in South Africa. There was an incident involving one citizen and it was not a fatal incident,” said Magwenya.

“And so it’s surprising why we are continuously experiencing this anti-diplomatic and unconstructive posture coming from some in Ghana.”

However, he said the government was encouraged by political leaders in Ghana’s parliament who had expressed their unhappiness with the stance taken by their country’s high commissioner to SA.

TimesLIVE