DA's fire fades under GNU

That the judiciary is independent is perhaps the most enduring myth of the post-apartheid era.

- William Saunderson-Meyer

It is the national catechism that we all recite around braai fires, dinner tables and cocktail parties: the politicians may be rotten, parliament supine, the prosecution service comatose, the police and criminals hand-in-glove, but thank God for the judges.

It is a delusion and an increasingly threadbare one at that. There should be no doubt that the ANC’s determination to extend its hegemony over every lever of societal power has made substantial inroads into the judiciary.

This week, in a letter to chief justice Mandisa Maya, EFF leader Julius Malema ripped into the Constitutional Court’s continued delay - now almost 500 days, rather than the norm of three months, and now also a full two months after her vow to “expedite” things - in delivering judgment on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala matter.

“It is troubling that a matter implicating so high an office should now be subject to an unprecedented delay,” Malema wrote.

This, he warned, was “creating a perception that the court is not immune to political pressures”.