President Jacob Zuma is rapidly running out of excuses to avoid having his day in court, the Democratic Alliance said on Saturday.
“The first thing that we are going to do [after the August 3 local government elections] is to demand that the president be charged for his 783 charges of corruption. A fish rots from the head and it’s very clear that South Africa is rotting because of our very poor president,” DA spokeswoman Glynnis Breytenbach said in Pretoria.
“He sets no example at all, to anybody. He does nothing admirable. He is now running out of place and the time to run to. He needs to man up and face those 783 charges and take whatever music comes his way. We will start off with that and go after everybody else.”
Last month, the presidency said Zuma was studying the high court ruling denying him leave to appeal the review of the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) decision to drop corruption, fraud, and racketeering charges against him in 2009.
His spokesman Bongani Ngqulunga said Zuma would decide once he had mulled the judgment whether or not to petition the Supreme Court of Appeal in a bid to overturn the High Court in Pretoria’s ruling.
The leave to appeal was denied by a full bench of the same court that held in April that Zuma should face the 783 charges that were withdrawn in 2009, smoothing his path to the presidency.
The criminal charges against Zuma were withdrawn by then NPA head Mokotedi Mpshe on the grounds that wiretapped conversations of senior officials in the Thabo Mbeki administration suggested possible political meddling surrounding the indictment of Zuma.
The high court’s April ruling held that Mpshe’s decision was irrational, and that he was under political pressure to withdraw the charges which stemmed from the multi-billion rand arms deal signed a decade earlier. The case was brought to court by the DA shortly after Zuma was elected.
On Saturday, Breytenbach joined the DA’s Tshwane mayoral candidate Solly Msimanga, the party’s deputy federal chairman and Western Cape finance MEC Ivan Meyer, and fellow DA MP Natasha Mazzone for the launch of the official opposition’s plan for corruption-free cities across South Africa.
Msimanga said cities, including Pretoria, were bleeding due to extensive corruption.
“We will be pursuing prosecutions for those people who have literally robbed this city and all the other cities of billions of rands. In this city alone, we have lost R1.8 billion which went towards corruption and wasteful expenditure in the last year alone. That is R157 million per month or five million per day. That’s not something we should be sweeping under the carpet,” he said.
“Glynnis will be working with us to ensure that not only do we go after the culprits but we put in place mechanisms that ensure that legally, things like these don’t happen, going forward. We are very serious about fighting the scourge of corruption because we understand that it is robbing our people of the opportunities to better their lives,” Msimanga said.
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