South African President Cyril Ramaphosa againfiled on Tuesday in the Western Cape Supreme Court, where he challenged a panel report that claimed he violated the constitution during his earlier “Farmgate” scandal.
In 2020, Thieves broke into President Ramaphosa’s farm and stole over half a million dollars from one of his sofas. In 2022, one of his private security guards went to the police to report the theft, sparking the Farmgate scandal. Critics from opposition parties, including the Economic Freedom Fighters (EEF), accused him of money laundering and said that if the money was obtained legally, he would not hide it on a couch or try to cover up the crime by not reporting the stolen amounts to the police. He responded and confirmed that the amount stolen was $580,000 and came from a legitimate buffalo sale.
President Ramaphosa’s political party, the African National Congress (ANC), has been the ruling party since the end of apartheid in 1994. Given Ramaphosa’s re-election campaign ran Because it was solely an anti-corruption effort, it sparked nationwide outrage and calls for his resignation. The national parliament subsequently set up its independent panel to conduct a review of the incident. The panel report confirmed the sales receipt for 20 buffalo but said there were many questions about the transaction that were unclear, before noting that there was “significant doubt about the legitimacy of the source” of the stolen money and alleging wrongdoing by the president. President Ramaphosa immediately challenged the findings of the panel at the Constitutional Court of South Africa (ConCourt).
Section 89 of the South African Constitution allowed Parliament can impeach a president if he is found guilty of serious violations of the law or misconduct. The report, of course, would have triggered an impeachment committee to do so inquire Find out about the president’s actions and investigate the origin of the money, why it was found in furniture, and why the theft was not reported to the police. However, the ANC majority blocked Parliament’s vote for an impeachment committee in December 2022.
The opposition party EEF then applied to the ConCourt to reopen the impeachment proceedings. In May 2026, The Constitutional Court of South Africa (ConCourt) ruled that the ANC violated the rights conferred by Section 89 of the Constitution when it used its majority decision-making power to block an ito conduct an impeachment inquiry into its own leader and that independent review committees should be able to assess the president’s handling of the cash theft.
In response, President Ramaphosa confirmed that he would not resign but would retain his presidency for the entirety of the final term, which ends in 2029. Instead, he made it official revived its 2022 challenge to the parliamentary panel’s report in another court yesterday. He submitted that the report was “seriously flawed,” misunderstood its mandate and relied on inadmissible hearsay evidence regarding the theft, urging the court to overturn the panel’s finding.
