Editorial: Party can no longer defend leader

ON Saturday May 24 2014, Jacob Zuma stood on the sprawling grounds of the Union Buildings in Pretoria.

He raised his right hand and the world watched as he made four sacred vows to South Africans.

He swore to be faithful to, obey, observe and uphold the constitution of our republic.

By his side stood Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, the man Zuma had appointed in his previous presidential term to be the guardian of our constitution.

The same man who, two years later, would declare that through his conduct on the Nkandla matter, the president had failed in his primary and most sacrosanct duty to defend and uphold the constitution.

Yesterday’s Constitutional Court ruling is by far a defining moment in our country and a significant day for our democracy.

By ordering Zuma to personally pay back the money spent on non-security upgrades to his Nkandla home, the court reinforced the value of holding our executive to account.

It reaffirmed the powers of the public protector and cemented the authority of one of our democratic pillars.

Significantly, yesterday’s ruling is the strongest and most encouraging declaration that, although not perfect, our constitution works.

It was crafted by patriotic men and women who believed that our hard-earned freedom must be protected, fiercely, against any threat that seeks to reverse our gains, undermine our stability and prevent our prosperity.

To them, we must be grateful.

In his emphatic, and somewhat poetic, judgment yesterday, Mogoeng defined a South African president as a “constitutional being by design, a national pathfinder and the personification of the nation’s constitutional project”. Zuma is neither. The power to remove him from office ultimately rests with the party that deployed him.

In its deliberations, the ANC must therefore ask itself how many more feeble excuses it can come up with to defend a man found by the highest court in the land to have failed to act in accordance with our nation’s supreme law.