THE high court in Pretoria is due to hear an urgent application by the DA tomorrow in which it will ask the court to force President Jacob Zuma to furnish it with documents on which he based his latest cabinet reshuffle.
The party is specifically concerned with the axing of Pravin Gordhan as minister of finance as well as the ousting of his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas.
Advocate Steven Budlender, acting for the DA, yesterday told Judge Bashier Vally that the arguments would last an entire morning.
The judge commented that as it was an urgent application, he would endeavour to deliver his judgment tomorrow after hearing the arguments or, at the latest, on Friday.
According to the DA, they needed the documents urgently to prepare for their main application against Zuma.
No date has yet been set for the main application, which was lodged two days after Zuma’s controversial decision to reshuffle his cabinet, and to fire Gordhan and Jonas.
The DA’s James Selfe said they would approach the court for a preferential date on which to hear the main application.
In the main application, the DA is asking that Zuma’s decision to axe Gordhan and Jonas be declared unlawful and invalid. They are also asking that the decision to replace Gordhan with Malusi Gigaba be overturned.
The party also demanded that the president had to, within a few days of its lodging the main application, hand over to the DA all relevant reports and documents on which he based his decision to fire the pair.
The DA especially wanted the “intelligence report” on which it was said the president relied when he axed the pair.
But the Zuma camp re-
mained mum about the “report” in its answers to the DA’s interlocutory application.
In his heads of argument, which will be presented to court later this week, advocate Ishmael Semenya SC, acting for Zuma, accused the DA of being on a “fishing expedition”.
He said the DA was abusing the legal process and he would ask the court to dismiss the application with costs, on a punitive scale.
Semenya is of the opinion that the DA is not entitled to any record on which Zuma based his decision to reshuffle his cabinet.
“The president’s decision to reshuffle cabinet is quintessentially one that belongs in the category of executive decisions that deserve protection from disclosure The applicant is thus not entitled to any record of the decision,” Semenya said in his heads of argument.
He said it was the DA that quoted, in their main application, the contents of what it called an “intelligence report”, but then failed to reveal the full contents, source or author of the report.
“It is indeed the applicant that is obliged to produce this report in respect of the main application,” Semenya said.
He questioned how the DA relied on the content of the “report” in launching the main application, yet was now calling on Zuma to produce this “report”. Semenya called this absurd.
He said the president, in any event, had the power, derived from the constitution, to hire and fire cabinet members.
He also questioned how the DA could say the matter was urgent in light of certain agencies which had downgraded South Africa to junk status.