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There is a common belief that the reason President Zuma refuses to heed the calls for his resignation is the fear that he might end up in jail. Therefore, the argument goes, he wants to stay on till 2019 or else wants to be assured that the next president will not have him prosecuted, thus the push for his ex-wife.
But it will take a lot more than just guaranteeing the disappearance of the charges against him to loosen the grip of our Teflon President, writes Melanie Verwoerd.
ConCourt judges face much more than legal questions in Zuma case
Prince Mashele writes that the Constitutional Court is dealing less with a clear-cut matter of legal facts, but more with a philosophical (jurisprudential) question. The Court is being called on to infer the intention of the drafters of the Constitution, or to interpret the Constitution in way that would, unavoidably, reveal the judges’ philosophical inclination on a morally fraught matter.
The question is a moral one because fundamentally it’s about the conduct of a President who has been flagrantly injuring the interests of the country. While the justices of the Constitutional Court are men and women of law, they are learned and conscious enough to appreciate the contextual weight and social implications of their judgments.
The immediate reaction of Western leaders is to call for the obliteration of the perpetrators, but this strategy by itself is totally flawed. It can be applied to enemies with a fixed geographical location. American and British bombers obliterated German and Japanese cities with millions of military and civilian casualties as a result. This brought them victory in the Second World War, writes Clem Sunter.
Shared accountability needed to solve SA's water crisis
Expert Greg Matthews writes that we cannot deny that available water resources countrywide are at an all-time low due to the current drought, and the stark reality is that, while wetter conditions were expected, and realised in some areas, over the summer months as a result of the forecasted La Nina, the rain alone cannot solve all of the country’s constraints or secure enough resources for the future.
The sense of crisis that we are feeling at present has further been intensified by two fundamental problems: firstly, demand for water services has grown at a faster pace than the infrastructure, and secondly, that people use water as though they are living in a water-rich country, with little regard for conservation.
So where to from here?...
