True to form, former president Jacob Zuma mounted a last-ditch effort to avoid jail at the weekend.
As hundreds of supporters arrived at his KwaZulu-Natal homestead of Nkandla, his legal team filed an application to the Constitutional Court for a rescission of its order for him to be jailed for 15 months.
In tone, the application is somewhat a departure from the bravado Zuma has consistently displayed when he insulted and lied about the judiciary in the lead up to his conviction. Instead, he has questioned the constitutionality of his sentence and claims that because of his poor health, his incarceration would be a death sentence.
The court has agreed to hear him next Monday. Zuma’s exploration of every potential loophole in the law to avoid accountability is not surprising. It is a strategy that allowed him to rise to the presidency a decade ago while fighting off allegations of corruption. It is a strategy that has helped him avoid answering a litany of corruption allegations against him so far.
Whether the court will change its mind is yet to be seen. What is of particular concern is what is unfolding between now and then.
Eager to be seen as a force to be reckoned with in SA, his supporters have turned the Nkandla village into some form of war base, declaring that not only would Zuma not hand himself in, if any police dare come to arrest him, blood would spill.
Taxi associations as well as other groups of Zulu regiments, though unsanctioned by the Zulu royal household, have fashioned themselves as Zuma’s personal army.
We must ask yet again, what our law enforcement will do in the face of such disdain and provocation. No right-thinking citizen would ever support any violence that Zuma’s loyalists are so obviously itching for. Ours should never be a country where the rule of law is undermined with such impunity.
The ANC has so far failed to make significant intervention to quell this lawlessness. Zuma’s contempt is so deep that only a political solution void of accountability would be acceptable to him. That cannot be allowed. Nor should we allow anarchy to win the day.
Our law enforcement can no longer hide their heads in the sand. The rule of law must prevail.
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