Publication: Cape Times Issued: Date: 2006-11-17 Reporter: Tony Weaver Reporter:

Feeding Frenzy of Zuma Fans Ignores a Far more Damning, Elegant Phrase

 

Publication 

Cape Times
Date

2006-11-17

Reporter

Tony Weaver

Web Link

www.capetimes.co.za

 

The ongoing Jacob Zuma/ Schabir Shaik saga has thrown up some weird and wonderful tales, but none quite so weird as the baffling 17-month-long silence of Judge Hilary Squires around the phrase "a generally corrupt relationship".

On October 10, Judge Squires wrote a private letter to Business Day's legal affairs correspondent, Ernest Mabuza, stating that he (Squires) had never used the words "a generally corrupt relationship". Moreover, Judge Squires said yesterday, this was "the second time I had written to this newspaper to try to rectify the misquotation".

Business Day splashed this second letter to Mabuza in their weekend newspaper, The Weekender, and the rest is history. The furore that erupted has been characterised by a helluva lot of smoke and mirrors. This was because the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) judges, in confirming Shaik's 15-year jail sentence, referred to the phrase in a subsidiary civil judgment relating to the seizure of his assets.

The Zuma fan club went into a feeding frenzy. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) immediately demanded Zuma's reinstatement as deputy president, and for the five SCA judges to resign.

Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was quoted as saying "we will never accept that Jacob Zuma would receive a fair trial because the president suspended him following what he believed was coming from Judge Squires". Similar calls were made by the ANC Youth League and the SACP, Zuma's other two main backers.

This is arrant nonsense and Vavi should stick to what he knows best, namely the rights of workers. He clearly has little, if any, understanding of the law and of legal matters.

True, Judge Squires never used the phrase "a generally corrupt relationship". That phrase was used by lead prosecutor Billy Downer. True, it would appear as if somewhere along the line, the phrase was moved into quotation marks, and was not used in its original context, which was purely descriptive.

Yesterday, I ran an internet search on Google using the key words "Squires generally corrupt". I got 96 400 matches on South African websites alone, and 101 000 hits on the internet as a whole. That's a whole lot of urban legend.

In our original report on the conviction of Shaik, the opening paragraph read: "'Not only convincing, but overwhelming' is how Justice Hilary Squires has described proof that businessman Schabir Shaik and deputy president Jacob Zuma have had a generally corrupt relationship." No quotation marks around that dreaded phrase, making it descriptive rather than a direct quote.

Judge Squires in part convicted Shaik of being part of a conspiracy to commit corruption and used what is, to my mind, an even more damning phrase: he said that between the two men there was a "mutually beneficial symbiosis".

More fully, he said: "It would be flying in the face of common sense and ordinary human nature to think he (Shaik) did not realise the advantages to him of continuing to enjoy Zuma's goodwill to an even greater extent than before 1997; and even if nothing was ever said between them to establish the mutually beneficial symbiosis that the evidence shows existed, the circumstances of the commencement and the sustained continuation thereafter of these payments can only have generated a sense of obligation in the recipient.

"If Zuma could not repay money, how else could he do so than by providing the help of his name and political office as and when it was asked, particularly in the field of government-contracted work, which is what Shaik was hoping to benefit from? And Shaik must have foreseen and, by inference, did foresee, that if he made these payments, Zuma would respond in that way."

In other words, a typically judge-like way of describing a "generally corrupt relationship". This was confirmed by the SCA which, after the furore erupted, said that its interpretation of Squires's term "symbiosis" was that "on the evidence in this case an overall corrupt relationship existed" between Shaik and Zuma.

The baying for blood and for the reinstatement of Zuma by his cheerleaders is, ultimately, a desperate clutching at straws. The confirmation by the SCA of Shaik's 15-year prison sentence has to be the final nail in the coffin of the Zuma presidency, and they know that, hence the rhetoric.

And I think I know why Judge Squires decided to break his silence after long months of waiting: if I were him, one day when the history books and the books of famous quotations are published, I would far rather be known for the witheringly elegant phrase "mutually beneficial symbiosis" than for the altogether more pedestrian "generally corrupt relationship".

With acknowledgement to Tony Weaver and Cape Times.