By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Constitutional Court has set down a date to hear the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) bid to set aside parliament’s decision not to refer President Cyril Ramaphosa to impeachment committee over Phala Phala scandal.
In a directive issued on Thursday, ConCourt said the matter has been set down for hearing on the 26 November.
In a founding affidavit filed in mid-February, the EFF argues that the National Assembly’s rejection of the Section 89 report was irrational because the facts, and the rules of parliament, left no room for a reprieve for Ramaphosa.
Sparing him an impeachment inquiry offended against 11 provisions of the Constitution, in particular the obligation on parliament to hold the executive to account.
The EFF is asking for the exceptional remedy of substitution. In the alternative, it wants the court to refer the report back to the chamber for a fresh vote.
The case will revisit a report that found Ramaphosa had, on the face of it, a case of serious misconduct to answer in relation to the origin of forex stolen from his game farm and clandestine efforts to recover it.
According to Ramaphosa, the stolen sum was $580,000 paid in deposit for buffalo by a Sudanese buyer and hidden in a sofa by an employee.
The report, written by a panel chaired by former chief justice Sandile Ngcobo, apparently drove him to the brink of resignation before he decided to take it on review in the consitutional court on the basis that the panel had misread its mandate and impermissibly relied on hearsay from former spy chief Arthur Fraser.
He argued in his application that the panel could not place a reverse onus on him to refute Fraser’s claims, which included that the money was donations from African and Middle Eastern countries smuggled into South Africa by Ramaphosa’s former special adviser, Bejani Chauke.
The panel had conflated the meaning of “prima facie evidence” and “sufficient evidence”, where the latter was the more stringent and correct test.
The ANC majority in the National Assembly voted overwhelmingly to reject the Ngcobo panel’s findings, and when the apex court subsequently denied the president direct access, he let the matter lie instead of turning to the high court.
Ramaphosa was reelected for a second term in June, but only with the help of opposition lawmakers after the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since South Africa became a democracy in 1994 at the end of apartheid.