Time is at the heart of the political and legal machinations around parliament’s impeachment process against President Cyril Ramaphosa over the $580,000 cache of dollar bills filched from his couch at Phala Phala.
On Monday, the newly established impeachment committee elected its chair — Rise Mzansi’s Makashule Gana, a solid choice given his track record in politics. He is apparently incorruptible and a cut above other politicians in the integrity stakes. He has already expressed awareness about the importance of the task.
Now that the committee is established and its chair elected, there are key legal and political questions that will determine how (and when) Ramaphosa concludes his term — and timing will be crucial. As a first step in his strategy to ward off this, the biggest threat to his presidency and his legacy, Ramaphosa has launched a high court challenge against the report by three jurists that is the foundation of the impeachment proceedings.
The panel, chaired by former chief justice Sandile Ngcobo, found that there was “prima facie” evidence that Ramaphosa had a case to answer in the Phala Phala matter — which ought to have set the impeachment process against him back in 2022. But following an application by the EFF and the African Transformation Movement (ATM), the Constitutional Court has now voided the vote that blocked the process four years ago, taken when the ANC still had an overall majority in parliament.
I think he’s got a really strong case because the panel really messed up
— Lawson Naidoo
The executive director of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, Lawson Naidoo, says Ramaphosa’s legal strategy has every chance of success. Lawson says Ngcobo’s panel failed to answer the four charges central to its inquiry, launched at the instigation of the ATM. Instead, it based all its “evidence” on the “hearsay” of former spy boss Arthur Fraser.
“I read Cyril’s application carefully. To me, I think he’s got a really strong case because the panel really messed up. They were preoccupied with the issue of where the money came from, and this was not among the four charges against Ramaphosa. We all want to know that. But that was not part of the work of this panel,” Naidoo says.
The big question for the committee chaired by Gana in the coming months is whether it can commence its substantive work while the merits of the report are being contested in court by the president.
Ramaphosa made it clear in his papers that while the committee can begin procedural work, it can only proceed to the actual impeachment part if and when the courts reject his legal challenge. If the judiciary upholds his argument, the whole process dies anyway.
The president stated in his court papers that if the committee goes ahead regardless, he would bring an interdict application. This would be politically undesirable for Ramaphosa, as it would give the impression that he is resisting being held accountable.
Of course the committee might only get to the impeachment stage months from now, by which time the court deliberations might be under way. A neat political solution would be if MPs proceeded with setting up the rules and getting their ducks in a row, but halting the process before it gets to the nitty gritty.
However, it is unclear whether the DA and other GNU partners would agree to this. Ramaphosa may, in the end, have to take the interdict route. He is understood to be ready to do so.
Again, Naidoo says, he stands a strong chance of succeeding. “The legal test for the interdict will be that the president will need to show that he would suffer irreparable harm if the process were to continue, and he would say, ‘Look, I believe this report of the panel is fundamentally flawed legally and factually, and I will be severely prejudiced if the inquiry were to proceed on the basis of such a flawed report,’” he says.
Naidoo adds that both the legal and political processes could take a long time — as seen, for example, in the long drawn-out impeachment of former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane.
If the impeachment process ever does begin in earnest in parliament, it might only be when Ramaphosa is on the last lap of his tenure. If the ANC is preparing to elect its new leadership, it may no longer be useful for opposition parties to target Ramaphosa.
Even if the requirement that two-thirds of MPs must back final impeachment is never met, a lengthy process of debating the issue would be politically embarrassing for the ANC. And the question remains: will South Africa ever be told the true story of the Phala Phala dollars?
