Bashir saga puts judiciary in firing line

Apart from voluntarily signing up to the ICC, our government has signed to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), as well as the Open Government Partnership (OGP), as programmes aimed at ensuring a government that is transparent, people-centred and responsive to the needs of the millions of our people who still suffer from the legacy of apartheid's selective development. File photo: Ashraf Shazly

Apart from voluntarily signing up to the ICC, our government has signed to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), as well as the Open Government Partnership (OGP), as programmes aimed at ensuring a government that is transparent, people-centred and responsive to the needs of the millions of our people who still suffer from the legacy of apartheid's selective development. File photo: Ashraf Shazly

Published Jun 17, 2015

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While many will see Omar al-Bashir’s hasty exit as a feather in our cap, there will be personal humiliation for President Jacob Zuma, says Mike Wills

Cape Town - So the government, under legal compulsion, is going to “launch an investigation” into how the Sudanese president was able to leave the country in defiance of a court order, a saga which earned the dubious distinction of a New York Times editorial calling the actions of the administration “disgraceful”.

Everyone knows how this will play out.

The full judgment of the Gauteng High Court must be “received” and “considered” and then appealed, right on the deadline for such action, and appealed again, after which minds will be applied and a ministerial committee formed, which eventually will report back to the president whose mind must again be applied to its findings which ultimately will implicate only the air traffic controller who gave clearance for Omar al-Bashir’s jet to take off, but he won’t be too stressed because his pay-off will be an appointment as ambassador to Iceland.

And this will move with a languor that would make a snail impatient.

It’s a transparent farce. The judgment can be accessed instantly and read in an hour, and a competent person with presidential authority to make some calls could have a full report on who did not do what within 24 hours.

Not that any of that is really necessary. The president already knows whether he was fully informed of this serious drama as it played out or, equally alarmingly, that he wasn’t.

There’s no win anywhere for him. Either someone within his government clearly defied the court order or decided they were powerless to prevent defiance, or everyone was so clueless they didn’t know any of this was happening until it was too late.

What is also troubling is the arrogance within Dirco (which most people still call Foreign Affairs) in the invitation for al-Bashir to attend.

It was inevitable that there would be a legal challenge to his presence in South Africa – we are littered with civil liberties NGOs itching for just such a fight and we have courts prepared to hear their pleas – but there must have been an assumption that administrative diktat (“a grant of immunity”) would trump that pesky legalistic stuff.

While many will see al-Bashir’s hasty, embarrassing exit from our shores as a feather in our cap, there will be personal humiliation for Zuma. In the eyes of his African peers at a major summit he was not in control.

And therein lies the bigger problem. The current ruling clique is very frustrated with the courts getting in its way.

They point to their party’s overwhelming democratic mandate and refer to judges as “unelected” (and even, in the words of Gwede Mantashe, “counter-revolutionary”).

Zuma, in particular, must see the judiciary at every turn constantly delving into his personal finances, his private home, his senior appointments, his policy processes and now his ability to throw a glitzy bash for all the Big Men of Africa.

The ominous question is: How much longer will he tolerate this?

* Mike Wills’ column Open Mike appears in the Cape Argus every Wednesday.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

Cape Argus

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