Letters

RW Johnson asserts that the courts are party to an Mbeki-led conspiracy against Jacob Zuma (Courts and counter-revolutions, July 16).

He invokes two pieces of proof: the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) "leaked its verdict against Zuma to the media before it was publicly announced", and that it "parroted the phrase about a 'fundamentally corrupt relationship'" between Zuma and Schabir Shaik "betraying they hadn't even read the original transcript of the Shaik trial".

Johnson's facts are not just scant, they are flat wrong:

He confuses the SCA judgment in 2006 in Shaik's corruption appeal with its ruling more than a year later relating to search and seizure warrants served on Zuma.

The phrase "generally corrupt relationship" (Johnson cannot even get this right) was used in the Shaik ruling, not the Zuma one.

Of course the SCA slipped (as it immediately acknowledged) in ascribing the phrase to the trial judge. But it was used in public comment on the trial judgment, before the appeal, and in oral argument during the appeal.

The trial transcript for the Shaik appeal exceeded 6000 pages. Johnson knows SCA judges cannot publicly answer his blunt charge they did not even read it. Someone who knows must set the record straight.

The court outcomes belie Johnson's thesis. Zuma succeeded in his rape trial defence. He succeeded in having his corruption trial struck from the roll. He won one warrant challenge in the high court and lost one. The appeal against those orders to the SCA resulted in three judges dismissing his claims and two supporting him (the Constitutional Court ruling is now pending). Hardly the stuff of institutional servility.

Johnson's co-columnist in Face Off, Khehla Shabane, is stoic in dealing with his weekly condescensions.

But he is spot-on to challenge Johnson this time on his astonishing allegations that the judiciary as an institution is involved in the presidential conspiracy in which he believes.

Jeremy Gauntlett SC
Cape Town

With acknowledgements to Jeremy Gauntlett and Business Day.