President Cyril Ramaphosa says the African National Congress (ANC) Deployment Committee does not instruct the judiciary on who it should appoint to fill a vacancy.
Ramaphosa, who is testifying before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture in Johannesburg explained the minutes of the party’s Deployment Committee which in March 2019 recommended that two judges should be appointed for vacancies that had opened up.
He says that only the Judicial Services Commission can appoint judges.
“The Deployment Committee knows that at best all it can do is note a vacancy. There are certain names that could be proposed and having done that, it also knows very well that it is not an appointing structure and by definition, by the way, our constitution works it could never have a judge appointed,” says Ramaphosa.
Video: President Ramaphosa appears before the Commission:
Earlier, Ramaphosa attributed that the absence of minutes of the ANC Deployment Committee between 2012 and 2017 to poor record-keeping.
The President, who had headed the Deployment Committee as the party’s deputy was questioned on how cadre deployment within the governing party took place when he first appeared in April.
Ramaphosa says that as a party, the ANC often finds itself unable to record the minutes of some meetings.
“I think that you can ascribe that to rather unfortunate recordkeeping because in the in the main, the ANC has so many meetings one after the other so many committees and I think those that are in charge just take notes and just take a decision and then it is communicated,” says Ramaphosa.
