EFF asks top court to throw out Ramaphosa case

The EFF wants parliament’s vote on the section 89 report into the Phala Phala scandal last month to be declared invalid and set aside.

Instead, a new date must be set within 30 days of the order to undertake the vote on the report anew. ANC MPs ganged up to vote against the panel’s report, stopping a possible impeachment of President Cyril Ramaphosa.

The opposition party has filed court papers seeking leave to oppose Ramaphosa’s Constitutional Court case in which the president wants to have the panel’s report reviewed and set aside.

The report found Ramaphosa has an impeachable case to answer in the theft of foreign currency from his Limpopo farm in 2020.

In a filed affidavit, EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu argues that the report Ramaphosa is challenging cannot be reviewed as the panel was not tasked with taking a “judicial and/or scientific decision”.

Theirs was the “humble” task of determining whether there was prima facie evidence of wrongdoing to advise the National Assembly on what course of action to take regarding the scandal, Shivambu said.

“To the extent that the report does not provide binding recommendations, our courts have established that such recommendations/decisions are inchoate and not reviewable as a matter of principle,” he said. “There are other steps and decisions to be made that could lead to the president not being impeached. All this speaks to the infancy of the process that could hardly render the report ripe for reviewing.”

In fact, Ramaphosa rushed to court in haste instead of waiting first to find out whether the National Assembly would accept the report’s recommendations, he said.

Shivambu argued that the panel’s report was not part of the section 89 process, as the impeachment process only kicks in once the National Assembly takes a decision on the report.

“Given all these permutations and the infancy of the report in the entirety of the impeachment process and the separation of powers principle, it cannot be conceivable that the report is reviewable, especially given the technical and fundamental debatable points raised by the president.

“Ultimately, the president retains the right to have a review and set aside the National Assembly’s eventual decision, should it choose to impeach the president, which a review application could well include the report. It is just not desirable for this court to deal with that application in piecemeal fashion,” he said.