The veteran journalist Max du Preez has publicly rejected an apology issued by Independent Newspapers over a claim he made in a column run by the group late last year.
In the column headed, by the Pretoria News, "Zuma - SA's one-man wrecking ball", (December 30 2015), Du Preez stated:
"If [Jacob Zuma] had surrounded himself with able ministers and advisers and listened to them he could still have been an exemplary president....But the after-effects of his corrupt relationship (in the words of a judge) with his financial adviser, the debt he owed to those who put him in power and his obvious view that he was more of an African chief than the president of a modern democracy led him on a different path."
The piece provoked a furious reaction from The Presidency. In a statement Zanele Mngadi said Du Preez,
"... repeats a lie that Judge Hilary Squires corrected a few years ago. The Judge pointed out that he never said that President Zuma had a corrupt relationship with Mr Shabir Shaik. The phrase was created by the media and was repeated many times until many people began to believe it was true, flying in the face of fair and truthful reporting. It is mind boggling why Independent Newspapers and Mr du Preez decided to repeat this lie that has been corrected by the Judge before."
This relates to the controversy that erupted in late 2006 after a Supreme Court of Appeal, in a subordinate civil matter, misattributed the phrase a "generally corrupt relationship" - to refer to the relationship between Shaik and Zuma - to trial court Judge Hilary Squires rather than prosecutor Billy Downer. This error was used, at the time, by then Business Day / Weekender journalists' Vukani Mde and Karima Brown (now senior group editors at Independent Newspapers) to attack the integrity of the court, and to question whether the judiciary was capable of protecting Jacob Zuma's rights to a fair trial. In the SCA's main judgment on Shaik's conviction in the criminal matter (which did not make the same error) the appeal court described the relationship between Zuma and Shaik as "an overriding corrupt relationship" and a "sustained corrupt relationship."