The use of the phrase “we went to sleep for 10 years” (on former president Jacob Zuma’s watch) by the outgoing Wits chancellor and former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke, was part commentary and part confession. The commentary has been widely responded to, the confession not. Moseneke was one of the co-authors of the seminal majority judgment of the Constitutional Court on 17 March 2011, which declared the Hawks an inadequate substitute for the Scorpions. There is nothing sleepy about that. However, in 2014 when the amendments to the Hawks’ founding legislation were impugned by Hugh Glenister and the Helen Suzman Foundation, the learned judge did seem to slumber. Having ruled in 2011 that the legislators should make the decision of a reasonable decisionmaker “in the circumstances”, he declined to have any regard to expert evidence of circumstances tendered by Glenister that warned of the grand corruption perpetrated by and on behalf of Zuma. Instead, he was party to a judgment...
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