Court to rule on Cope leadership

As the South Gauteng High Court prepares to start hearing arguments from Monday morning to finally settle the Cope leadership dispute, the party’s warring factions on Sunday continued to bicker, this time over whether the court process should go ahead as planned.

Cope spokesman Phillip Dexter, who represents the Mosiuoa Lekota group, said “both sides had agreed on postponing the matter” because one side’s senior counsel was “very ill” and had been hospitalised.

But Sipho Ngwema, another Cope spokesman, rejected Dexter’s statement, saying there was no agreement to postpone the matter, especially since the other side had refused to extend that courtesy to them when they were in a similar situation earlier this year.

It is understood that the South Gauteng High Court opposed the proposed postponement, with the court’s registrar telling Lekota’s lawyers that “hearing dates are not allocated to suit the… parties or legal representatives. The allocated dates of hearing therefore stand”.

Any application for postponement, unless agreed to between the parties, must thus be brought and dealt with in court, wrote the registrar.

In February, Lekota, one of Cope’s presidents, successfully lodged an urgent application in the court barring the party’s other president, Mbhazima Shilowa, from performing any party duties or attending Parliament as a party member.

This was after an internal disciplinary hearing found Shilowa to have wrongfully authorised the transfer of R5 million from the party’s parliamentary fund into the party account. He was also found to have made a false declaration to Parliament regarding the party’s audited financial statements, and paid a further R2.1m in unauthorised funds for the aborted national congress in May last year.

Among others, Lekota also wanted the court to declare Cope had lawfully expelled Shilowa as a party member with effect from February 8; that Shilowa had lost his seat as a Member of Parliament that day and for the court to re-affirm Lekota as Cope president. This is the matter set to be heard this morning.

In turn, the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town granted Shilowa an interim order restraining the Speaker of Parliament from filling his seat in the National Assembly, pending the decision of the Joburg court.

Two bodies are purporting to be the party’s national committee – one led by Lekota; the other by Shilowa.

Earlier this year, Parliament was drawn into the Cope presidency battle and had to ask the party to resolve its leadership disputes and inform the legislature accordingly of who its legitimate leader was.

Cope tried twice to hold an elective conference last year, with the first turning into a policy assembly and the second in December collapsing amid a deadlock over credentials and frustrations that spilt over into violence. - Political Bureau