NCUBE APOLOGISES TO TSHABANGU : PROF JONATHAN MOYO

Prof Welshman Ncube apologises to Harare High Court and Senator Sengezo Tshabangu. The rare apology from a professor of law and a senior member of the bar is in his voluminous 2,087 pages long urgent court application he has filed with the High Court in Harare for the rescission of a judgement in HC 275/25 (see link below), which he alleges was a “default judgment”, contrary to what the judgment itself actually says; as it does not make any reference to any “default” of any kind.

This comes after Prof Ncube made two elementary but costly mistakes that contributed - although they were not the only factor - to his losing the case whose judgment he now wants the court to rescind, and reopen to enable him to relitigate the case; so he can correct his own careless mistakes.

Normally or usually, a rescission application is made to correct a mistake made or an injustice done by the court.

Not so, in this case.

Prof Ncube’s claim that the court’s decision was a “default judgment” — which is the basis of his urgent court application — is in fact not the finding of the court in its judgment; but Prof Ncube’s own self-interpretation, in what is manifestly a desperate “hail Mary” move to wriggle out of his self-made spot of bother in which he now finds himself.

Otherwise, the court found that Prof Ncube’s opposing affidavit — which he deposed on behalf of his Triple C in HC 275/25, and upon which his lawyers relied to argue on the papers and in the oral hearing of the case – was in shambles to the point of rendering Senator Tshabangu’s application “unopposed”. This was after Tshabangu’s lawyers had successfully challenged, as a point in limine, the legal validity of Prof Ncube’s opposing affidavit.

The court found that Prof Ncube’s opposing affidavit was not legally valid and it struck out.

There was no default, Prof Ncube’s affidavit was struck out, after factual and legal arguments by the lawyers; on the papers and orally. This outcome cannot be described or characterised by any stretch of the imagination as a “default judgment”.

Prof Ncube’s opposing affidavit had fatal mistakes due to his carelessness. Finish and klaar.

Indeed, in his urgent court application for a rescission, Prof Ncube admits that the mistakes he made were careless and avers that, “[While] careless it was not deliberate and certainly did not indicate any disdain for the Rules of Court…”.

It is against this background that Prof Ncube has tendered an apology to the High Court and Senator Tshabangu in his founding affidavit to his urgent court application for a rescission, and avers on paragraph 18 of that affidavit that he made “an unfortunate error”.  But his error was not just unfortunate, it was careless and very costly for a professor of law and a senior member of the bar to make. 

A case management hearing on Prof Ncube’s urgent court application for a rescission is set down for this Wednesday at the High Court in Harare. He was writing on X.

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