JUSTICE MALALA: Zuma's moves come out of Putin's vicious playbook
'Vladimir Putin, the president and strongman of Russia, is one of Zuma’s heroes'
We do not know who broke into Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s offices. We are unlikely to know because most crimes of this nature go unsolved in South Africa. But we should worry because we have seen this script before in many other parts of the world in which states are captured by corrupt elites, and it’s ugly. We should worry because, first, in these captured states, the corrupt elites get intelligence operatives to break into judges’ offices. It is not to steal anything much: not valuables or information or anything similar.It is merely to intimidate the judges, to make them remember that “we know where you live and what you do”. Then the elites move against them, perhaps through an investigation or something similar. While they put the screws on the judiciary, other wings of the dirty state focus on the media. They call for a media tribunal. They allege that the media is in the pay of rich elites. They invent new enemies: capitalist media, unpatriotic elements or some such. The...
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