John Hlophe, once a celebrated judge whose career ended in disgrace with his impeachment five months ago, has been rapidly placed into parliament to lead the official opposition.
Dr. Hlophe is anticipated to be fully active on Friday when he will commence the debate responding to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Thursday speech, which outlines the new coalition government’s plans to address South Africa’s many issues including a 32% unemployment rate, high crime levels, deteriorating infrastructure, and land ownership challenges in a country plagued by racial inequality.
“Watch this space. See him perform on Friday,” Dr. Hlophe’s lawyer, Barnabas Xulu, said.
Dr. Hlophe’s dramatic fall as a judge and rapid rise as a politician are both linked to former President Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s most divisive politician who made a surprising comeback in the May 29 general election.
Less than three years after becoming the first South African president jailed for an offense contempt of court Zuma led his newly formed party, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), to third place in the election. However, he was barred from taking his seat in parliament due to his 15-month jail sentence, leading him to appoint Dr. Hlophe as the Leader of the Opposition.
The position comes with an annual salary of nearly 1.76 million rand ($94,000; £73,000), which Dr. Hlophe might find welcome after reportedly losing his judge’s pension due to his impeachment for gross misconduct. MK has become the official opposition because the second-largest party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), joined President Ramaphosa’s coalition government after his African National Congress (ANC) lost its majority in the election for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Born in 1959, Dr. Hlophe, who grew up as a child labourer with a mother who was a domestic worker and gardener and a father who was a security guard and traditional healer, pursued law studies locally and abroad, earning a PhD from the UK’s prestigious University of Cambridge.
As a lawyer in South Africa, he participated in legal battles against the apartheid regime’s harsh laws before transitioning to an academic career, even returning to Cambridge as a Roman law tutor in 1987.
Despite this background, Dr. Hlophe is a strong proponent of the “Africanisation” of South Africa’s legal system, criticising it as an imposition by colonisers, and asserting that Africans have mastered it even better than the colonisers – a statement he made to the African Legal Professionals Association in Durban shortly after joining MK in June.
“African law has never been allowed to develop and take its rightful place,” he added.
Dr. Hlophe reiterated this theme after being sworn in as an MP, stating that MK is unapologetic in its call for the law to be Africanised. “By that, we mean we bring back the laws that used to govern the African people. One of those laws is this, the land in Africa can never be the subject of private ownership. The land belongs to the nation,” he said.
Some critics view Zuma’s decision to appoint him as MK’s parliamentary leader as a political favour.
His impeachment in February concluded a prolonged saga that began in 2008 when two judges of South Africa’s highest court accused him of trying to improperly influence them to rule in favour of Zuma in a corruption case. Dr. Hlophe denied the charges, with Xulu explaining that he merely had a “casual conversation” with the two judges about “legal principles” in a novel case – something judges often do among themselves.
Xulu noted that with the state no longer willing to cover his legal expenses, Dr. Hlophe chose to abandon the fight to clear his name in favour of a political career, joining MK as it aligned with his “ideal” political vision. “He was not going to sit at home and be idle,” Xulu said.
“He’ll continue the fight for justice and transformation in a different platform, the National Assembly, where he will have more freedom, more protection,” Xulu added.
Dr. Hlophe’s impeachment marked a tragic end to his judicial career, as he was once among the elite of South Africa’s judges, or as constitutional law expert Narnia Bohler-Muller put it in The Conversation magazine, he was “both brilliant and controversial, on and off the bench.”
At age 35, in 1995, just a year after apartheid ended, he made history as the first black judge in South Africa’s Western Cape province, and five years later, he became its Judge President. However, his leadership was tumultuous, as he accused some colleagues of treating him as a “legal non-entity” due to his race, while facing counterclaims of verbal abuse and even assaulting a judge, which he dismissed as malicious rumours.
He was also involved in several other controversies, including allegations of serving as a non-executive director at a financial company and receiving about $26,000 in consultancy fees over three years. He denied any wrongdoing, stating he had declared his links to the company to the then justice minister. The Judicial Services Commission (JSC) dismissed a case against him due to a lack of evidence.
Now, he has become the first ex-judge to not only be the Leader of the Opposition but also a member of parliament’s justice committee and MK’s representative on the JSC. The JSC, comprising both judges and cross-party MPs, is the body that found Dr. Hlophe is guilty of gross misconduct, leading to his impeachment by parliament. It is also responsible for appointing judges, including his successor as Western Cape Judge President.
His long-time adversaries have vowed to challenge his elevation to the JSC in court, with the campaign group Freedom Under Law calling it “irrational” for an impeached judge to be involved in appointing other judges. Significantly, the ANC supported his appointment to the JSC, while two of its coalition partners, the DA and the Afrikaner nationalist Freedom Front Plus, opposed it.
William Gumede, an academic at Wits University’s School of Governance in Johannesburg, said the ANC’s decision was unsurprising. “There are going to be big battles with MK, but this is not one that the ANC was prepared to fight because it could have set the wrong tone for the opening of parliament,” Prof. Gumede told the BBC. He added that the ANC had to consider Dr. Hlophe’s popularity despite his impeachment.
“Many black voters appear not to mind supporting people implicated in abusing public office if these people can successfully cast themselves as victims of a conspiracy, supposedly by the ‘system’,” he said.
Professor Gumede noted that much now depends on Dr. Hlophe’s performance in parliament. “If he provides effective opposition, MK could grow, and he could potentially be its next leader,” he added.
This situation is a far cry from the 65-year-old’s childhood as a labourer for a wealthy sugar-cane farmer who helped his university education. “I grew up poor, like most South Africans,” he said on a podcast hosted by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), an opposition party allied with MK in parliament.
“I started weeding sugar-cane fields at the age of 12. I would carry 12kg of fertiliser on my back and never look back. We worked very hard, even on Christmas and public holidays. There were no holidays, considering there were no labour laws then,” Dr. Hlophe added.
His comments serve as a poignant reminder of the harsh realities of black lives under white-minority rule and the racial and ideological divisions in a country where black people have only been able to vote for 30 years.
Nancy Mbamalu
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