The Pretoria High Court judgment is scathing of top SAPS brass and how they attempted for three years to avoid accountability.
A scathing judgment handed down in the Pretoria High Court on 13 January 2021 has revealed that the SAPS top brass may have attempted in 2017 to illegally procure an eavesdropping device at the inflated price of R45-million to protect the interests of the ANC and not the Republic of South Africa.
It was alleged intelligence received that same month of a possible “national threat” of some “magnitude” and passed on to then-president Jacob Zuma by “a minister in the security cluster” had prompted the secret emergency procurement, SAPS admitted in court papers.
This alleged threat was never disclosed.
These papers offer the first real glimpse of what went down behind the scenes at the Courtyard Hotel in Arcadia, Pretoria, in December 2017, only days before the ANC’s fraught elective conference at Nasrec which saw Cyril Ramaphosa win by narrowest of margins.
The ruling by Judge Norman Davis points to a possible serious abuse of state resources by senior law enforcement officials sympathetic to former president Zuma, who backed Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma in the leadership race.
Davis’…