The sealing of the CR17 campaign documents has come back to haunt President Cyril Ramaphosa who was criticised by former Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng.
Mogoeng said Ramaphosa had a duty to disclose who funded his campaign in 2017.
He was speaking during keynote address delivered at the inaugural SAfm lecture on Wednesday. His talk was held under the theme, “Constitutionalism and upholding the rule of law in South Africa”.
During his speech, Mogoeng addressed the some of the key failures of the current government as well as its failure to to disclose the documents.
He said Ramaphosa had a duty to disclose who funded his campaign and let the country in on his way to the presidency.
“The president therefore had the duty to know, if he did not know already who was funding his campaign and to disclose that personal benefit compositely as a benefit from the CR17 campaign as an entity or more appropriately from each donor with a specified amount. Why? So that Parliament and the public could know who was helping or had helped him to perform better than his competitors and enabled him to become ANC president and a few months later, president of the Republic,” he said.
Mogoeng accused the president of having frustrated the work of the former public protector, Thuli Madonsela and her office, by withholding the truth during the CR17 probe.
Mogoeng said that the emails exposed the “falsehood of the version of the President and the CR17 campaign managers”.
“He demands more than once that the Public Protector should explain to him how and from whom she obtained, these admittedly truthful but reputationally damaging emails. Not once does he explain why he and his team chose not to tell the truth but to rather mislead the Public Protector as he did. Instead, he says that the emails are irrelevant to the Public Protector’s findings. This cannot be correct, for not only are the emails relevant but they also expose the falsehood of the version that the president and the CR17 campaign managers chose to present to the Public Protector,” he said.
Attempts to get comment from the Presidency were unsuccessful at the time of publication.
This is a developing story.
The Star