The vexatious issue of Mr Zuma

Undoubtedly Mr Jacob Zuma, former Deputy President of the region some might wish to call Southern Azania, has been placed in an invidious position. The recent brouhaha over who is or was not the author of the phrase 'a generally corrupt relationship' only lends emphasis to the extent to which Mr Zuma's civil rights have been abused by the failure of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA] to try Mr Zuma at the same time as they tried Mr Shaik.


One understands from various media reports that Mr Shaik is going to make a further attempt this time to convince the Constitutional court that this case was procedurally flawed and his rights were violated. For as long as this attempt is currency, for that long must Mr Zuma wait before the NPA can conclude whether or not they are going to pursue their case against Mr Zuma. Again this inherently violates his right to campaign fairly for the Presidency of the country.

It could also be that his ability to campaign is now fatally flawed in any event since there will inevitably be a stigma hanging over his head like the proverbial sword of Damocles [whoever he was]. This says that Mr Zuma is dammed if he doesn't fight the case and may well be dammed if he does. In a sense this is the Knight's gambit from chess-whereby Mr Zuma is in check and any move he makes costs him his Queen and it's checkmate.

Aside from all the knowledge that is out in the marketplace that indicates that Mr Zuma is in serious trouble the problem is inherently one that we all know now that he received R1.3 million bucks from a man who was not his employer and that notwithstanding all the allegations that the money was a loan no loan documentation was led and no evidence accepted that supported that idea. So we the public were left with two questions.

The first asks what was the payback for the alleged loan since no paperwork existed. A loan is by definition something that must be paid back-so since the arrangement that I have for instance with my mortgage bond holder requires financial payback and there was no evidence of financial payback conditions then some other payback must have been in their minds, and we the voting public need to know what that arrangement was to have been.

This leads us to the idea of 'intention' as a caller to the Perlman debate on the issue this week referred-[I only caught a smidgeon of this debate driving across town avoiding the morning gridlock and surfing between Gareth Cliff, UJFM and SAFM ].
The caller, who sounded like an accomplished autodidact and announced he was from the Eastern Cape, referred to the term 'delict'.

I looked this up later and in the margins of an old textbook on Roman law I found what I had written back in 1967 that there is reference to 'declarations of intent' or 'expressions of will' and the caller suggested we explore the events that transpired over the course of the less than flavoursome relationship between Mssrs Shaik and Zuma.

The debate team pondered the inherent complexity of demonstrating intention. I agreed with them in that personal internal debate that got going in me as I drove or rather snailed in creeping traffic.

How can we assess Mr Zuma's state of mind without having had the opportunity to hear whether MR Zuma saw Mr Shaik as an opportunistic fool from whose money Mr Zuma soon parted him; with NO INTENTION OF EVER GIVING HIM ANYTHING IN RETURN.

In other words we don't know whether Mr Zuma simply saw Shaik as a useful source of revenue, and if some schmuck wanted to trade on past association and give him a million bucks or so then who was he to object-I would see that as a perfectly reasonable position for a man who has no particular code of ethics other than self-enhancement and 2who is desperately attempting to play catch on the years stolen from him by the former evil regime. The alleged evidence that demonstrates anything to the contrary has not been tested and is therefore wanting.

The other thing that we should all need to test in a courtroom to establish some indication of intent may be found in the same place that Eliot Ness found regarding Al Capone in his great movie 'The Untouchables': violations of the Income Tax act.

The simple assessment of intent may be construed through the answer to the second question. Did Mr Zuma declare the 1,3 million bucks he received from Mr Shaik to the Southern Azanian Revenue Service [SARS], irrespective of how he defined it, and was he legally able to do this [or not do so] in terms of the rules of procedure prevailing at that time?

The taxman has always grabbed as much of my money as the market can bear and I'm sure he has grabbed chunks of yours too, my reader. Did her get his rightful chunk of Mr Z's 'informally accrued' money, and assuming he did, did he get it timeously. Or was the declaration retrospective?