the creation of a parallel branch to theirs’.^27 According to the court
papers, Magashule’s PEC simply ignored the request and never gave
them an opportunity to review the audit. The Constitutional Court
judges were not impressed with the PEC’s reason for doing so: The
respondents’ answer to this allegation is that an audit could not be
carried out because members of the ‘regime change group’ seemingly
wanted their own membership file audited. One thing is clear, no audit
was conducted nor is it suggested that members of the Fidel Castro
branch are not entitled to have their membership numbers audited only
because they support the so-called regime change. In our view, the
members of the Fidel Castro branch were entitled to have their
membership audited to assess their good standing and failure to do so
amounts to conduct inconsistent with the Membership Audit
Guidelines and is thus an irregularity.^28
Ramakatsa belonged to the Joyce Boom branch, also situated in the
Motheo region. On 6 May 2012 , this branch held a ‘legitimate’ and
‘quorate’ meeting where delegates were ‘properly elected to represent
the branch at regional and provincial conferences’. The branch also
nominated some of its members to be elected to the PEC. Despite
submitting a report to the PEC that set out in ‘remarkable detail’ the
credentials of the elected deployees and the branch’s legitimacy, the
PEC simply barred the branch from attending the provincial
conference. Magashule and his fellow respondents tried to convince the
court that the meeting in May ‘never took place’. Again, the judges
dismissed this response. ‘Other than the bare denial, the respondents
do not furnish even the slightest evidence that the meeting did not take
place,’ they noted. The court found that the respondents ‘in effect