Former President Jacob Zuma, pursuing what he says is his long-held desire to ensure the State Capture Inquiry was constitutionally established, has turned to the Constitutional Court to question a ruling that he should pay the legal fees of a challenge against the inquiry.

He has insisted his legal action is not premised on a wish 'to block investigations into corruption which implicated me'.

The matter involves the decision that allowed Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng to nominate a judge to chair the inquiry, instead of Zuma, President at the time, being able to choose the judge himself.

Zuma is appealing against a personal costs order made by the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) in December 2017 when it dismissed his review application of a decision made by then Public Protector Thuli Madonsela that allowed Mogoeng to nominate a judge for the inquiry.

A TimesLIVE report notes Zuma’s application to review that decision was dismissed in the High Court, which ordered Zuma to pay the costs of the review application in his personal capacity, on the attorney and client scale.

A few weeks later, Zuma lodged an application for leave to appeal against the whole judgment and High Court order.

However, he resigned as President in February 2018 and his successor Cyril Ramaphosa withdrew the application for leave to appeal against the dismissal of the review application in April that year.

The application to appeal against the costs order was not withdrawn as it affected Zuma personally. It is this costs order Zuma challenged.

In August last year, the full Bench of the SCA dismissed Zuma's application for leave to appeal with costs.

In his application before the Constitutional Court filed in November last year, Zuma said the reason he launched the review application was to ensure there were no future challenges regarding the commission’s constitutionality.

Zuma said the review application related to the powers of the Public Protector in ordering remedial action to be taken by the executive and the judiciary. He said the matter related to whether the Public Protector can remove a constitutional function of the President and delegate it to the Chief Justice, notes the TimesLIVE report.

Zuma said he felt it was an important constitutional issue that needed certainty and the awarding of a punitive personal costs order against him was incorrect because he was acting as the President who was concerned about the constitutionality of the remedial action.

‘… the remedial action effectively took away the constitutional powers vested in the President and gave them to the judiciary. This was a novel point,’ he argues.

He added, 'My anxiety was that if I established a commission of inquiry on such terms as set out in the Public Protector's report and it later turned out that I had acted unconstitutionally… such an important commission would have been tarnished with legal and constitutional uncertainties. Further, if such challenges were to succeed, the state would have wasted resources on a futile and unconstitutional process.'

Full TimesLIVE report