The Democratic Alliance (DA) shall be launching an urgent application in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) for a copy of the Inspector General for Intelligence’s (IGI) report into the intelligence tapes that found their way into the hands of President Zuma’s private attorney, Michael Hulley. The tapes were used by then Acting National Director of Public Prosecutions, Mokotedi Mpshe, as a justification for dropping corruption charges against President Zuma before his election in 2009. The fact that the IGI and Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence (JSCI) have chosen not to make this report public is a sad reflection that in our democracy, information that is in the public interest has an unfortunate tendency to be suppressed, more in the interests of protecting powerful individuals instead of legitimate threats to our national security.

In 2009, Mr. Zuma was faced with seemingly intractable problems, not least the fact that, if he were elected president, he would be destined to spend more time in court facing the charges against him than actually governing. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) at the time, Mokotedi Mpshe, dropped all charges against President Zuma on the basis of supposed evidence of a political plot gleaned from secret intelligence tapes submitted to the NPA by Mr. Hulley.

There are a number of issues that this incident presents to us as a democracy that believes both in accountable government, and that the organs of state exist to serve the public interest and not the interests of powerful individuals. Some of them are issues that we have bought to the fore in the DA, and have led not only to our repeated calls for all information about the tapes and precisely how they found their way into Mr. Hulley’s possession, but have also formed the foundation of our legal case contesting the basis on which the charges against President Zuma were dropped.

The first is that this entire incident points to the existence of a state within a state, where the very mechanisms that are intended to protect our society as per our constitutional framework are abused and used for the purposes of private individuals as if the intelligence bureaucracy was their own personal fiefdom.

The second is that we as the public have never been privy to knowing precisely why the corruption charges against President Zuma were dropped. There have been the occasional snippets of information but nothing like the full disclosure required to prove that truly in our democracy no one, not even a future president, is above the law.

The third is that, if we are truly to be an open society, then information should only be withheld from the public in the most extreme circumstances, usually when our national security could be compromised by the revelation of such information. There are no such factors at play in this case. In fact, the very principle of full accountability from the highest levels of government downwards acts as a motivating force to release this report.

Last, the people of South Africa have a right to know. It is not the place of the IGI or the JSCI to withhold such information from the public. The chairperson of the JSCI, Cecil Burgess, was quoted in this morning’s press saying: “It is not for us to start making this report available to the media. It is not our report. We do not own this report. You will have to speak to the owner and author of the report.” This demonstrates exactly the problem – the fundamental misunderstanding at play over who government works for. A government report does not belong to the agency that commissions it, it belongs to the people who elected that government, and any claims to the contrary are anathema to the principle of oversight for which legislators are supposed to stand.

President Zuma always claimed that he wanted his day in court, so that his innocence could not be denied and that everything would be open and public. That is all that the people of South Africa want, and it is what we deserve. The DA’s PAIA application to the IGI will go some way toward shedding light on these events.