Letters

You quote Jacob Zuma asking why he should “find himself guilty” before a court has decided, Zuma makes clear he is available for president (April 18).

This is no objective judge speaking, but the alleged perpetrator of fraud and corruption himself. He need not await a court’s decision that may or may not find him guilty as charged. He himself is in first-hand possession of “inside information” about his own innocence or guilt.

It is high time we stop politely swallowing such oft-repeated piffle about, as Zuma puts it, the constitution insisting that individuals are innocent until proved guilty. That is not at all what the constitution says. What it says, in clause 35 (3) (h), is that “every accused person has the right to a fair trial, which includes the right … to be presumed innocent, to remain silent, and not to testify during the proceedings”.

That refers only to the trial. It doesn’t refer to nonparticipants like you and me before, during or after a trial, so let’s not have any of that tired old “sub judice” piffle either. It doesn’t prevent anyone from forming his own judgment, as I’ve already done… or indeed from freely choosing to change his mind.

It doesn’t remove the accused’s prior knowledge of his own innocence or guilt! All it does is to support the accused’s right not to reveal what he already knows. As Zuma himself says later in your article, he “could not answer” a question not because he did not have the answer, but because to give the answers in public now might be problematic when the matter ended up in court.

Jim Harris
Honeydew

With acknowledgements to Terry Crawford-Browne and Business Day.