By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Gauteng high court will on Tuesday hear former president Jacob Zuma’s request to appeal against a ruling that set aside his medical parole and said he should return to jail, his foundation said on Saturday.
The court said on Wednesday Zuma should go back to jail after the 79-year old began medical parole in September. He is serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court, after he ignored instructions to participate in a corruption inquiry.
Zuma’s legal team are appealing the ruling, as is the country’s prisons department.
“Judge (Elias) Matojane has indicated his intention to hear the application for leave to appeal on Tuesday 21 December,” Zuma’s charitable foundation said on Twitter.
Zuma handed himself in on July 7 to begin his prison sentence, triggering the worst violence South Africa had seen in years as his angry supporters took to the streets.
The protests widened into looting and an outpouring of anger over the hardship and inequality that persist in South Africa 27 years after the end of apartheid. More than 300 people were killed and thousands of businesses were pillaged and razed.
The legal processes against Zuma are widely viewed as a test of post-apartheid South Africa’s ability to enforce the rule of law, particularly against powerful, well-connected people.
Meanwhile, the Department of Correctional Services has filed a 22-page application to appeal Matojane’s far-reaching ruling that then National Commissioner of Correctional Services Arthur Fraser’s decision to release Zuma on medical parole was unlawful and that he should return to prison.
The department, like Zuma, insisted there was evidence that Fraser was legally justified in overriding the Medical Parole Advisory Board’s recommendation that the former president did not qualify for medical parole.
Like Zuma, the department had also sought to suggest the former president may be terminally ill.
Under the provisions of the Correctional Services Act, medical parole could only be granted to an offender “suffering from a terminal illness or condition or if such an offender is rendered physically incapacitated as a result of injury, disease or illness so as to severely limit daily activity or inmate self-care”.
After considering all the relevant medical reports and submissions by Zuma’s military doctors, the board had elected not to sign off on Zuma getting medical parole.