President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appointment of former deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo as chief justice and head of the judiciary has been hailed widely.
He is a solid figure, embedded deeply in our public consciousness after his extended leadership of the commission of inquiry into state capture that came to bear his name.
People think they know him and they like what they see. Astonishingly, the camera loves him.
He is thoughtful, his manners are impeccable, he has a wry sense of humour and a seriously impressive memory. He will, we assume, make a fine chief justice.
Well done Mr President, a good appointment at last.
How easily we are pleased. You see, you get just 12 years on the Constitutional Court and Zondo is due to leave in 2024. He will have just two years in the job!
Hell, he might not even see in the next general election, leaving Ramaphosa, should he for once act on time, the political space to make a new and popular appointment, depending on how he reads the political moment.
For politics is what the Zondo appointment is all about.
Not to honour a man who has laboured hard and with integrity to reach the pinnacle of his career, but to avoid making a hard choice between the most deserving of the candidates for chief justice, Gauteng judge president Dunstan Mlambo, and the choice of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC), whose toxic, rambling, shoddy, incoherent, self-aggrandising and oily process of interviews in February ended with it exceeding its mandate and “recommending” to the president the only woman among the four candidates, Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) president Mandisa Maya.
The whole thing was a mess from the start. Ramaphosa broke with tradition by not sending a single name to the JSC and in return he got what he deserved — an even bigger mess that he has spectacularly failed to resolve.
In appointing Zondo he also announced he would nominate Maya for the post Zondo has just vacated, deputy chief justice.
That raises the reasonable expectation that Maya will succeed Zondo, a change Ramaphosa will have calculated might work for him as the 2024 election approaches.
Or it may herald a crisis down the line, for what has happened is manifestly unfair.
I have no problem with Zondo. He is obviously a decent man and a solid citizen all round.
I also have no problem with Maya. I know little about her and her interview revealed nothing of her character.
She spoke up her own record and the questioning of her by the JSC was obsequious.
We have no idea how she would fare under pressure. We have seen Zondo falter somewhat under time pressure (he has still not delivered his final state capture report).
The only candidate put under any real pressure — particularly by a slanderous rumour repeated in the interviews by former EFF chair Dali Mpofu — was Mlambo.
Faced with the entirely fictional rumour that he had sexually harassed women, Mlambo didn’t flinch under the most intense public questioning at the JSC.
It was a display of public courage and discipline under real duress the likes of which I doubt I’ll see again.
Mlambo should replace Zondo as our next chief justice, and Ramaphosa knows it.
The courts cry out for efficiency and tough leadership. They have not had it for more than a decade.
Maya told the JSC in her SCA interview she thought the court she was about to lead was already efficient but she was able to tell the JSC last month that she’d done to the SCA what she’d promised back in 2017 — there are now more women judges there, it’s a happier place to work and the work is allocated more fairly.
It’s hard for an outsider to judge how difficult any of that might have been. What we can be sure of is that her court, like all courts, is a hotbed of gossip.
Independent investigative journalism team amaBhungane recently ran a curious story to the effect that Maya had actually been heard to repeat the Mlambo rumour before the JSC hearings.
But, unusually for amaBhungane, the article didn’t carry the name of the writer and so lost its power.
Still, it may or may not have been accurate. Judges gossip among themselves and about each other all the time. It’s not a crime.
Would Maya at least have known about the rumour that ended Mlambo’s candidature? Almost certainly, she did.
The rumour had been around for some time. People I have spoken to heard it in Cape Town and in Johannesburg last year.
And at least two judges associated with it happen to be in Maya’s court. How could she not have known about it?
In the movies, the questions would be what did she know, when did she know it, and what did she do about it?
It is all beside the point now, I get that. Ramaphosa has set up what looks like a succession.
In the process we lose, in Mlambo, a real giant.
Ramaphosa won’t care. What works for him is that Zondo will have to recuse himself from most cases that come to the Constitutional Court via the state-capture commission, and then leave office.
And the presidential hands will be clean. We’re done here.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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