In a sign of the sweeping political changes in South Africa, John Hlophe, a once-celebrated judge whose career ended in disgrace with his impeachment five months ago, has been installed in parliament to lead the official opposition.
Dr Hlophe is expected to be in full flight on Friday when he opens the debate in response to President Cyril Ramaphosa‘s speech on Thursday, in which he outlined his new coalition government’s plans to tackle South Africa’s many problems, including a 32% unemployment rate, high crime, deteriorating infrastructure and land ownership in a country plagued by racial inequality.
“Watch this space. Watch him perform on Friday,” Dr Hlophe’s lawyer Barnabas Xulu told the BBC.
Dr Hlophe’s dramatic fall from power as a judge, and his meteoric rise as a politician, can both be attributed to former President Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s most polarising politician, who against all odds made a stunning comeback in the May 29 general election.
Less than three years after becoming the first South African president to be jailed for a crime – contempt of court – Zuma led his newly formed party, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), to third place in the election.
But because he was barred from sitting in parliament due to the 15-month prison sentence he had received, Zuma turned to Dr Hlophe to take on the all-important post of leader of the opposition.
The post is delivered with an annual salary of just under 1.7 million rand ($94,000; £73,000)which Dr Hlophe will likely appreciate, given that he reportedly lost his pension as a judge following his removal for serious misconduct.
MK has become the official opposition party after the second-largest party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), joined President Ramaphosa’s coalition government after his African National Congress (ANC) lost its majority in elections for the first time since the end of the racist apartheid system in 1994.
Born in 1959, Dr Hlophe grew up as a child labourer in a family where his mother was a domestic worker and gardener and his father a security guard and traditional healer. He went on to study law at home and abroad and obtained a doctorate from the prestigious University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
As a lawyer in South Africa he participated in lawsuits challenging the draconian laws of the apartheid regime, after which he pursued a career as an academic, returning to Cambridge in 1987 to teach Roman law.
Despite this, Dr Hlophe is a staunch advocate of the “Africanisation” of the South African legal system. He says it was “imposed on us” by the colonisers and that “we, by the way, are better at it than they are” – a comment he made in a speech to the African Legal Professionals Association in the coastal city of Durban, shortly after joining MK in June.
“African law has never been able to develop and take the place it deserves,” he added.
Dr Hlophe returned to the theme after he was sworn in as MP, saying MK had “not apologised in our call to Africanise the law”.
“By that we mean that we are bringing 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 property. The land belongs to the nation,” he said.
Some critics saw Zuma’s decision to appoint him as MK faction leader as a return for a political favour.
His ouster in February ended a long-running saga that began in 2008, when two South African High Court judges sent shock waves through legal and political circles by accusing him of attempting to improperly influence them to rule in Zuma’s favor in a corruption case the controversial politician was facing at the time.
Dr Hlophe denied the allegations. Mr Xulu told the BBC he had only had an “informal conversation” with the two judges about “legal principles” in what was a “new” case – something judges often do among themselves.
Mr Xulu said that with the state no longer willing to pay his legal fees, Dr Hlophe decided to give up the fight to clear his name and focus on a career in politics. He joined MK because it was his “ideal” political home.
“He didn’t sit at home and do nothing,” Xulu said.
“He will continue the struggle for justice and transformation through another platform, the National Assembly, where he will have more freedom and protection,” Xulu added.
Dr Hlophe’s removal marked a sad end to his legal career, as he was once among South Africa’s finest 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 the age of 35, in 1995, just a year after the end of apartheid, he made history by becoming the first judge in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Five years later he became its chief judge.
But his leadership there was turbulent, as he accused some of his colleagues of treating him as a “legal nonentity” and undermining him because he was black. He faced counter-accusations of verbal abuse and even assaulting a judge, which he dismissed as a malicious accusation based on rumors and gossip.
He was also embroiled in numerous other controversies, including allegations that he had served as a non-executive director of a financial firm and that he had received approximately $26,000 in consulting fees over three years.
He denied any wrongdoing and said he had declared his links to the company to the then justice minister. The Judicial Services Commission (JSC) dismissed a case against him over the matter, saying there was a lack of evidence.
Now he is the first former judge who is not only the leader of the opposition, but also a member of the parliament’s Justice Committee and, to top it all off, a representative of MK in the JSC.
The JSC, which is made up of judges and MPs from all parties, is the body that found Dr Hlophe guilty of serious misconduct, leading to his impeachment by parliament.
It is also responsible for the appointment of judges and will choose their successor as President of the Western Cape Judicial Division.
His old opponents have vowed to challenge his appointment to the JSC in court, with activist group Freedom Under Law saying it “irrational” for a deposed judge to be involved in the appointment of other judges.
It is telling that 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 did not come as a surprise.
“There are going to be big fights with MK but the ANC was not prepared to engage in that because it could set the wrong tone for the opening of parliament,” Prof Gumede told the BBC.
Furthermore, the ANC had to take into account the fact that Dr Hlophe is still popular despite his ouster, Prof Gumede said.
“Many black voters do not seem to mind supporting people who are involved in public abuses of power, if these people can successfully portray themselves as victims of a conspiracy, supposedly of the ‘system,’” he added.
He said much depended on Dr Hlophe’s performance in Parliament.
“If he puts up an effective fight, MK can grow and he could potentially become the next leader,” added Prof. Gumede.
This is in stark contrast to the 65-year-old’s youth, when he worked as a laborer for a sugar cane farmer he called “filthy rich,” who later helped finance his college education.
“I grew up in poverty, like most South Africans,” he told a podcast organised by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), an opposition party with which MK has formed an alliance in parliament.
“I started weeding sugar cane fields when I was 12. I would carry 12kg of fertiliser on my back and I never looked back. We used to work very hard, even on Christmas and public holidays. There were just no public holidays as there were no labour laws back then,” Dr Hlophe added.
His comments are a poignant reminder of life for black people under white minority rule, and of the racial and ideological divides that run through a country where black people have been allowed to vote for only 30 years.
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