Chief Justice Raymond Zondo said he was blindsided by Zuma’s defiance of the Constitutional Court’s order to appear before the State Capture Commission of Enquiry.
In an interview on Eyewitness News on his retirement, Zondo spoke about the difficulties of dealing with former President Jacob Zuma’s conduct at the Commission.
In the end, Zondo said, there was no other option but to ask the Constitutional Court to hold him in contempt of its order.
Zondo said Zuma got the same treatment anyone else would have if they had done what he did.
After all other attempts to get Zuma to appear before the Commission, he was eventually subpoenaed, but then staged a dramatic walk-out when an application he’d brought for Zondo’s recusal as chair was dismissed.
Zuma was again subpoenaed and the Commission applied to the Constitutional Court for an order compelling him to comply.
Zondo said that Zuma’s defying of the Constitutional Court’s was completely unexpected. “I would have never thought that anybody would ever defy an order of the Constitutional Court, not to speak of somebody who had been president of the country. And there, too, I had to make a decision as to what we would do.”
Zondo said this wasn’t a difficult decision to take: “Because my approach was: ‘What will be done is what is normally done in the courts when somebody defies an order of court’.”
Zondo said it was clear that this was the only option and that he had to do what was required in terms of the law.