SHAPING DEMOCRACY
Courts are a bulwark against state overreach, not trespassers in politics
Accusations of meddling helped to cow apartheid judges, but are out of place when Constitution is supreme
The Constitutional Court unflinchingly and famously decided that President Jacob Zuma violated the Constitution in failing to comply with the remedial action ordered by the public protector in her Nkandla report. When confronted with the government’s self-created social grants fiasco, the same court held public officials to their constitutional obligations and gave effect to the grantees’ fundamental rights. Since then, there has sadly been a recurrence of the harmful notion that democracy requires that judges dare not venture into political terrain and when doing so they are, perhaps unwittingly, complicit in a threat to SA’s democratic order. Thus, so the argument goes, the outcomes in the Nkandla and social grants matters are indicative of a judiciary "taking over the job of democratic politics" — as recently stated by political analyst Steven Friedman. Political parties and nongovernmental organisations are to blame: they "want judges not to strengthen democratic politics, but t...
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