Cape Town - After a meeting with Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng and Speaker Baleka Mbete, President Jacob Zuma said on Tuesday the heads of the three arms of government would in future meet at least twice a year to harmonise relations between them.
“We have just concluded a meeting which we felt we should… as a result of developments and interactions, we needed to have this meeting,” Zuma said after the three, along with National Council of Provinces chairwoman Thandi Modise, met for three hours at his Genadendal residence.
“So we’ve had a discussion, a very good discussion and in this discussion we have also agreed that we need to meet at least twice a year. One of those meetings, we will have more of our colleagues who work with us in different arms, so that we can discuss some of the issues we believe need to be discussed and harmonise in one form or another. So we are very happy that we had this meeting … we were able to discuss a number of things, which of course were matters that we thought were important to discuss.”
The president did not reveal the topics of discussion and did not take questions from journalists.
“This is for purposes of the state harmonising its work so that we are able firstly to deal with matters in a sense that will help. As you know the judiciary in particular, they have got a very difficult task to help us in terms of interpreting the law, interpreting the Constitution, helping making us to understand legally how things are supposed to be going”.
He added: “The meeting has been very useful to all of us.”
Mogoeng agreed that the meeting had been productive and meeting more regularly in future would help the different arms of state address matters of concern before it became too late.
“To the extent that there might be concerns here and there, it afforded us the opportunity to reflect on the general health of our constitutional democracy and the need has arisen for us to meet more often than we have in the past so that if there are matters of concern we are able to tackle them before it is too late. So, I found it a very fruitful meeting.”
Mbete said the discussion had helped to shed light on how South Africa’s constitutional dispensation was evolving and “the extent to how we each operate within the limits of what is expected of us in terms of being compliant in terms of the constitution”.
Zuma met with Mogoeng and other senior judges in late August after the chief justice complained of Mogoeng who had warned of “the dangers of the repeated and unfounded criticism of the judiciary”.
At the close of that meeting, the president said there had been an agreement that government and the judiciary would “exercise care and caution with regards to public statements and pronouncements criticising one another”.
Two months earlier, the judge president of the Gauteng division, Judge Dunston Mlambo, berated government for violating a court order and the law by allowing Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, to leave South Africa after an African Union summit.
African News Agency
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