Another Take

The rejection of Schabir Sheik’s appeal is very shocking. The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) has confirmed that Schabir should be “stripped of his fortune”. The amount of money that has been taken from him by “asset forfeiture” is something like R33 million. He can no longer be a director of any company. He is reduced to a “position without money or power”. And he must go to jail for 15 years. What made these judges do this to our comrade? Did he rape? Did he rob? Did he hi-jack? Did he kill? What is stacked up in their judgement to bring these enormous penalties on the man’s head? Let us have a brief look. The judgement is here (PDF download). He is supposed to have had a “generally corrupt relationship” with Jacob Zuma. What this means in practice is that a list was made of the benefits Schabir was supposed to have got from the relationship, or attempted to get (these are only four in number). Then a different list was made of the benefits that JZ was supposed to have got. No attempt is made to show what benefit was for what other benefit – hence the “general” tag. This artificial device is supposed to mean that so long as an imaginary ledger can be drawn up for the seven-year period, with a few benefits on either side, then there must have been corruption. The first of the four benefits, and the only one from which Schabir Shailk did gain, was held by the judges to have been legitimate! Repeat, it was legitimate, and was even Zuma’s proper and bounden duty. This was when JZ intervened to scotch a rumour that Schabir was in Thabo Mbeki’s bad books. The other three “benefits” were the Renong, John Lennon, and Steve Tshwete discussions, none of which resulted in any business deal or profit to Shaik. The benefits that JZ got from Schabir over the arbitrary period of seven years (chosen by the Scorpions to be Oct 1995 to Sept 2002) were between R888K and R1249K in total. Most of this was computed from the use of a flat for three of those years, that JZ had from his friend and comrade Schabir (and the friendship is “accepted” by the SCA). There is not enough in all this to cause a flutter in a Church parlour on a Sunday morning. The second matter is the “fraudulent write-off”, or journal entry (nothing to do with JZ, as it turns out). This is a rather commonplace kind of dispute about accounting. Neither businessmen nor their auditors normally rot in jail over such matters. You don’t find them there. If anything you would expect a fine or a suspended sentence, especially when there is no complainant or injured party. The last matter is the “encrypted fax”. The SCA pretends to be unaware of the status of the encrypted fax at this moment. This is because of a legal fiction that says that only the evidence of the trial can be used in the appeal, and nothing subsequent to it. But we (at the Communist University) know that the encrypted fax was only certified by the Thint company as genuine after Penuell Maduna (ANC politician and Minister of Justice at the time) had procured a deal, on his own initiative, whereby he offered Thint immunity from prosecution in exchange for their certification of the fax. Maduna later double-crossed and even triple-crossed Thint, taking them for a lot of money and a free shopping trip to Europe with his wife. The full story is here. The encrypted fax is a dead duck. The SCA only deals with the status of the encrypted fax as it stood in front of Hillary Squires, which was already a very shaky status, of course. In order to show why a fax between two people who never came to court could convict a third one the SCA resorted to the obscure case of “Chorle” in 1945. To define corruption they go back as far as a “Placaat” of the United Netherlands of 1651, the very same year that Jan van Riebeeck was let off a corruption charge by the same United Netherlands authorities so that he could go and colonise the Cape, and plant the first apartheid hedge. Then the SCA judges make an incongruous and superfluous claim on the morality of the struggle, as if it belonged to them, and not to actual revolutionaries like Schabir Shaik and Jacob Zuma. The only thing that can compare with such a grotesque mix-up is the attendance of President Thabo Mbeki at P W Botha’s funeral this week. In short, there is nothing in the whole kettle of fish to take it above the lowest levels of legal process. It is only puffed up to get at Jacob Zuma. And Schabir Shaik, his friend, is the victim. He has only been put away to serve as a scarecrow, because the encrypted fax has been finished off as evidence by the revelations about Penuell Maduna, and can’t be used any more. Jacob Zuma will either not be charged at all or if charged will be acquitted. Schabir Shaik has been ruined and imprisoned as a substitute for Zuma and in the hope of embarrassing Zuma for as long as Shaik is in jail. It is a most monstrous cruelty. It will not work. Do read the judgement, please. The more people who read it the better. ANC NEC member Ngoako Ramatlhodi is quite clear about the nature of the Scorpion onslaught, which the bourgeois papers should, if there was such a thing as fairness, be screaming about in terms of “human rights” and “civil rights”, but are not. Still, Moshoeshoe Monare has given him a reasonable voice in The Star. The silly headline is not Moshoeshoe’s fault. Whose fault the mistaken substitution of “Zuma” for “Ramatlhodi” is, in the text, the CU cannot say (find it in the article linked below). What we can say is that it is typical of media “framing” that they cannot chew on one story and walk for another at the same time, to paraphrase what Lyndon Johnson said about Gerald Ford. In the USA there have been some changes. You know about them. Unfortunately the Democrats are as Imperialist as the Republicans. The SACP’s Red October Transport Campaign National Day of Action is on Saturday, November 18th and will be marked by a march in Pretoria assembling in Church Square at 09h00. It is a source of regret to the CU that we seem to be the only medium that is propagating this knowledge, so close to the time. Yet the urgency of the transport campaign initiated by the SACP is not in doubt, and if not for the Party we would not have this campaign. See the linked item below from COSATU about workers being killed while travelling on the back of a bakkie (once again). More details of the march will be given when known. COSATU also is the best source today for some sort of recognition of what the Israeli colonialists are doing again in Gaza. They are killing large numbers of people, including women and children and whole families, and laying waste to farms, roads and all means for the sustenance of the population. This Israeli genocide is supported by the Democratic Party in the USA as much as it is by the rival US bourgeois Imperialist party, the Republicans. See below. Click on these links: Ramatlhodi accuses Scorpions, Moshoeshoe Monare, The Star (818 words) Farm workers killed in Limpopo, COSATU Media Release (393 words) COSATU condemns latest Israeli atrocity, COSATU Media Release (274 words)