By: Clyde Ramalaine
Dear Mr. Lawson Naidoo
I am writing to you informed by you being cited as interviewed by journalist Karyn Maughan in her article with the headline Foundation Attacks Zondo Commission.
Your armchair one-sided analysis of the Zuma Foundation’s response to a legally truant DCJ Zondo who has shown himself compromised in a number of instances as one who play politics is naturally expected.
You have hitherto like DCJ Zondo shown no need to rebuke politician Minister Pravin J. Gordhan for his treatment of the Commission. It’s clear your interest was never constitutional respect but factional party politics in which you for reasons you know have taken sides.
The constitution of South Africa as adopted in 1996 and amended throughout affords President Zuma every right based on the bill of rights to challenge the conduct of the DCJ whom we know has his one eye on upcoming vacant CJ post and who increasingly strays politically as one that must deliver to his political masters heads on a platter. I have written about it after DCJ Zondo publicly became besotted to believe another politician Pope Molefe’s every word while refusing to as yet entertain those [Lucky Montana and Brian Molefe] who availed themselves to come and present a counter version.
You know as well as I do there is no crime called state capture if you are a jurist. You also know that state capture is a DA political campaign that found essence when the former PP chose to give capture the third C of the DA 2009 campaign meaning in our lexicon. I wrote extensively on this campaign if you care to research.
This campaign tool became useful in internal ANC circles when the incumbent SA president Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa back in 2017 opted to
Ignore ANC policies and made this his cornerstone theme. Clearly the campaign in its second life within the ANC delivered a billion Rand president who won by a marginal 179 votes. A president who is compromised because he was part of the Zuma presidency, one who made money while being a deputy-president and who is prepared to collapse the PP office to protect the names of his deep-pocketed funders.
Is it not strange that you “Mr. Self – Appointed SA constitutional custodian “ hitherto have had no energy to engage this ill-transparency and compromised if not captured state of Ramaphosa as president? Or shall we guess you at the same trough that you too depend on some handouts from the guys with deep pockets to keep your organization afloat. Is it not time we ask for who do you really bat and what interest is at play that has crafted you to be this openly bias.
I would attempt respecting you when you can tell us why until now you as the so-called constitutionalist and custodian have not taken the politician Gordhan on for his spoiled attitude.
Until then, we know you as one of those who are as factional outside the ANC with interest in factions if not individuals in the ANC whom you already adjudicated as guilty without any court ruling in that sense.
I as a public theologian further struggle with your epistemology of justice on this matter since you have yet to engage your own views on Zuma as tested against the Holy Writ you profess.
Alas’ it remains sad to see vocal institutions and individuals like you proving absent in objectivity as if objectivity is a contagious disease.
For the record, no court has ruled against President Zuma in the media crime of state capture and you know that very well yet you pretend you know of a court that declared him a criminal.
Lastly, I am on record to have said that The SoCC will never find state capture because that is but a political campaign. It should find on corruption just not state capture.
The truth is this commission is nothing but a latent labour-dispute-resolutions-forum because all that appeared from ministers to officials came crying how they were sacked lost a job and this in their minds automatically make them champions against state capture.
I raise this with you because you choose to call the Zuma Foundation’s response to a legally truant plausibly politically captured chair an attack when you lack the wherewithal to problematize why the Chairperson behave in media spaces towards a witness President Zuma in singularity in this fashion.
I tweeted this before the JZ Foundation wrote their response and my NGO will this week write to the CJ on the conduct of the DCJ. Naturally that too will be conveniently construed as an attack when for me it’s the pursuit of justice a justice that is not factional but cuts both ways.
Bishop Clyde N.S. Ramalaine
Chairperson of the Thinking Masses of SA (TMOSA Foundation)
