The president's decision comes five months after the Judicial Commission recommended the measure. Photo: Werner Beukes/SAPA
Four months after being impeached, former judge John Hlophe has agreed to become parliamentary leader for Jacob Zuma's Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) party.
This was confirmed by MP party spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela on Friday.
The party won 14.58% of the vote in the May election, but Hlophe was not on the party's candidate list.
That means one of the 58 members of parliament would have to give up their seat for him.
None of them have been sworn in yet because the party unsuccessfully boycotted the first sitting of parliament last Friday in a bid to deprive it of the legal basis to re-elect President Cyril Ramaphosa for another term.
Ndlela said his party's lawmakers would be sworn in next week, “probably on Tuesday”.
Hlophe was impeached in February and the National Assembly voted 305 to 27 to remove him from office.
This comes nearly three years after the Judicial Commission confirmed a Judicial Conduct Tribunal finding that President Zuma committed serious misconduct by referring his pending arms deal corruption case to two Constitutional Court judges.
The court found that when Hlophe tried to raise the issue with Justices Chris Jafta and Beth Nkabinda separately in the spring of 2008, a year before Zuma became president, he appeared to be trying to “persuade” the two judges for political reasons.
He maintains he did nothing wrong and has repeatedly delayed investigations into wrongdoing with legal challenges and unsuccessfully subjected the findings to legal review.
His impeachment came just hours after the Western Cape High Court rejected his final application to postpone the vote.
Justice Hlophe and Justice Nkola Motata were the first judges to be impeached in post-apartheid South Africa.
