GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Why the ANC cannot conceive of the Constitution as supreme
In the grand ANC hierarchy, there is God, the ANC (the former having divinely sanctioned the latter) and then, some way down the list, the Constitution
Over the past week, Judge Dunstan Mlambo delivered a series of brutal judgments in the High Court in Pretoria, all of which had Jacob Zuma at the heart. And brutal is a euphemism. The President was fairly savaged, his decision-making and conduct stripped away of any democratic pretense and the result laid bare for all to see: contempt for, and ignorance of, the Constitution he was elected to uphold. It is worth remembering that the ANC endorsed all of this. It has had multiple opportunities to disown Zuma. Instead, it embraced and defended him, denigrating his critics along the way. In doing so, it took joint moral ownership of his sins. This was the ANC on trial, as much as it was Zuma. In his early years, Zuma would regularly enthuse about how the Constitution was little more than the ANC’s plaything; a nice little document the party had invented, basically to indulge the pretense that ours was a constitutional order. But really, it was the ANC in charge — the Alpha and the Omega ...
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