Zimbabwe Shows Africa Can Tackle Corruption – The Zimbabwean

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Justice Loice Matanda-Moyo is a soft-spoken legal scholar. Yet she now finds herself one of the most feared anti-corruption crusaders in Africa. Zimbabwe, a country plagued by rampant corruption for decades, has taken its war on corruption to new levels, and Justice Moyo is leading the charge.

Just over a month into her new role as chairperson of the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC), Justice Moyo isn’t pulling her punches, with the arrests of former Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko and the Minister of Environment, Tourism and Hospitality, Prisca Mupfumira.

Despite being in the president’s cabinet, Mupfumira found her ministerial position mattered little as she was dragged to court on corruption charges involving $95 million from the state pension fund.

Mupfumira faces charges of “criminal abuse of duty as a public officer”.  Charges include the taking of unauthorized loans from the pension fund to buy a luxury vehicle and to fund her political campaign.

But Justice Moyo was not satisfied with merely the arrest of the minister. Her team also arrested the permanent secretary in the environment ministry, Munesu Munodawafa, as well as the former director of state residences, Douglas Tapfuma.

Under former president Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe became a hotbed of corruption. The ZACC, created during this era, was both toothless and ineffective. Staff still talk about the threatening phone calls they would receive if any powerful people were investigated. The message was clear: no high-profile cases should be opened.

But all that changed with the election of President Emmerson Mnangagwa in 2018, with his government making the fight against corruption a priority. When he took over at the helm, Mnangagwa declared a “zero tolerance” policy towards corruption and described the ZACC as “rotten to the core.”

The new president and his team thus decided to reform and revamp the anti-graft body in February, selecting new faces and giving it independent powers. Importantly, the new ZACC was to be bipartisan, with nine commissioners drawn from both the ruling Zanu-PF and opposition MDC, as well as from civil society.

So when the Mnangagwa government was looking for the right person to head the reformed agency, he turned to Justice Moyo, a High Court judge who clashed repeatedly with the Mugabe government. As a young prosecutor in 2004 she had even been arrested for standing up for justice. She has now been seconded to ZACC to lead an agency that is poised to serve as an example for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the continent.

From her office in Harare, Justice Moyo is overseeing more than 200 investigations of corruption. Her team of 61 investigators have been specially selected and vetted to ensure they are professional and impartial.

ZACC has five different centers across Zimbabwe to ensure that its investigations are carried out quickly across the country without bureaucratic delay.

What is key is that ZACC has the kind of political support that other agencies in Africa can only dream of. The Zimbabwean government has recently given ZACC arresting powers to prevent police leaks from tipping off powerful offenders. It is amending the Money Laundering and Proceeds of Crime Act to include Unexplained Wealth orders, which will make recoveries of ill-gotten wealth much easier. Furthermore, the government is in the process of crafting new legislation that protects whistle-blowers and witnesses in corruption cases.

These are bold steps forward for Zimbabwe that are making the rest of Africa sit up and take notice. It shows what a determined government is capable of, by creating institutions and empowering key people to clean up corruption.

And international cooperation is crucial. Recently the EU and the UK joined with President Mnangagwa to launch a nationwide campaign against corruption at all levels.  ZACC is already looking to sign MOUs with neighboring countries, first with Botswana, and then possibly with Zambia. According to Justice Moyo, corruption in southern Africa is not a national problem, it’s a regional one. With fuel smuggling, for instance, corruption often transcends national boundaries. This means that the anti-graft agencies of SADC member states must cooperate to tackle the problem.

Corruption of course is neither a uniquely Zimbabwean problem, nor an African one. However, to defeat it requires political will, bipartisan support, and judicial independence. Most importantly, it requires leadership.  Zimbabwe’s battle against corruption has just begun. But it has all the elements to succeed and serve as a template for the continent of Africa and beyond.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect Geopoliticalmonitor.com or any institutions with which the author is associated.

South Africa and Zimbabwe seek to strengthen defence ties – The Zimbabwean

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A parade was staged by Yam at the SA Army College on 2 September to formally welcome Chimonyo. The week-long visit is underway to maintain strong military relations between the two armies as well as to deliberate on army-to-army issues of interest in light of the recent appointment of Chimonyo as commander of the ZNA.

“Come my brother, let us sit in a bit of a relaxed environment and let us ponder on how do we respond to the challenges of the two landward forces”, stated Yam in his introductory statement. Yam said that reasons for the visit such as this are firstly, “That the two militaries have an obligation to ensure that they constantly understand their space and interaction” and secondly is that Yam believes that military cooperation means nothing unless it leads to a space for the stabilisation of economic prosperity.

In the wake of cyclone Idai, South Africa has been assisting Zimbabwe in building Bailey bridges over flood-ravaged rivers and according to Yam, there are currently 180 SA soldiers deployed to Zimbabwe for its construction. Yam states, “It was more of an intervention for the floods”, referring to the floods that Cyclone Idai caused on 15 and 16 March 2019.

Border security is a challenge that the two armies have been addressing for a number of years. Chimonyo said that primarily the two countries are doing patrols, having meetings and are strategising. “But you need to appreciate, human beings are very difficult. As much as we do our patrols, you’ll find others escape”. The two chiefs expressed their concern over borders security issues such as illegal immigration and drug trafficking and emphasised that it is not just the border between the two countries they need to be concerned about. “These [border issues] are also coming from the Great Lakes region and Somalia, coming down south” stated Chimonyo. “Actually they are coming from all over the world right now,” added Yam, who went on to say that it is high educated, young Zimbabweans heading south of their border that the Zimbabwean government is now worried about. Chimonyo also added that with Zimbabwe being under sanctions, there is a concern of their people fleeing for South Africa.

In speaking further on mutual cooperation, Yam identified that the sanctions currently on Zimbabwe do pose limitations on the cooperation of the two countries’ land forces. However, developments between Armscor and Zimbabwe are what Yam calls an “urgency”. Yam believes there is an argument to be made for Armscor and Zimbabwe to look into certain engineering aspects as well as co-research capabilities, “which may translate into co-production, but it’s too early [to tell] at this stage.”

In speaking on military training between the two armies, Chimonyo stated that this has been going on since 1994. “That has been going on for a long time but I still believe more can be done by our two countries.”

“The numbers differ every year. It depends on budget that determines how many get sent this side and that side but it is something that must never stop,” stated Yam. Yam went onto to comment on the importance of youth within the two countries militaries being acquainted. “We have realised, as military people and particularly as us, in Zimbabwe, that if you are going to talk of government to government cooperation, you need the junior and young officers to start training together, to be on the same name sake with each other. If you do that, you are doing it for stability for the next 30 years.”

At the conclusion of the media briefing  Yam hosted on Monday, he made a point of thanking the Zimbabwean National Army for the help it gave to South African Army members in the push against insurgence groups in the DRC. “That was a major, major land mission with the possible closure of our consul there. Moving by road, Zimbabwe, Zambia, moving to DRC and back – that is when I really knew that this brotherhood works,” Yam said.

Zimbabwe Shows Africa Can Tackle Corruption
Zimbabwe’s addiction to borrowing continues – as inflation rises

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Zimbabwe’s addiction to borrowing continues – as inflation rises – The Zimbabwean

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Stephen Chan, SOAS, University of London

Zimbabwe now faces a second major descent into inflation and economic despair in the space of 12 years.

The first, in 2008, involved almost metaphysical rates of inflation – 231m% at one point that year according to some reports, with other estimates even higher.

The crisis resulted in hugely controversial elections, which the opposition surely won – but which saw Robert Mugabe re-installed as president in a power-sharing deal with the opposition. To stabilise the economy, the worthless Zimbabwean dollar was jettisoned and people were given the option of using a basket of foreign currencies, the US dollar chief among them. The problem was then how to source US dollars – and this was done largely by borrowing.

Fast forward to 2019, nearly two years after Mugabe was ousted and Emmerson Mnangagwa installed as president – Zimbabwe’s annual inflation is officially 176%, the highest in the world after Venezuela.

But this official figure is almost certainly false. My own calculations, based on prices I observed during the 2018 Zimbabwean elections and reports from Zimbabwean friends now, estimate inflation at about 600%. And this is within what remains of the formal economy. Recourse to the black market to secure goods such as fuel and bread unavailable elsewhere means a parallel inflation rate that is higher – by my calculations, at about 800%. And now the publication of inflation data has now been suspended for six months.

The government’s inability to pay for electricity imports has meant power outages of up to 18 hours each day. This is in part a result of poor rains and low water levels in Lake Kariba, the source of a huge percentage of the nation’s hydro-electricity – amid reports that it might be altogether decommissioned. Even if this is not the case, the turbines at Kariba are far from being in good shape and, even in seasons of abundant rain, Zimbabwe had to depend on electricity supplies from South Africa and Mozambique. These countries now want to be paid.

Mnangagwa’s almost desperate slogan for Zimbabwe is that it is now “open for business”. But the elections of 2018 that were meant to legitimise his presidency were marred by violence and deaths and no election observer group validated the polls as fully free and fair. Under those conditions, initial promises of foreign investors faded away.

Dollars began to dry up, sourcing new dollars became impossible, and the new technocratic minister of finance, Mthuli Ncube, began desperate but hugely orthodox measures to instil some discipline in a runaway economy. Those who were rich and powerful declined to make sacrifices of their own, while those who were poor simply got poorer.

Tight control

Almost a year into the job, Ncube has reined in some of the profligacy in state spending and managed to bring in an increase in tax revenue. But his tax measures have been hugely unpopular, with poorer business people seeing them as disincentives to invest in future productivity.

One of his hugely unpopular early measures was to tax cell phone financial transactions. At a stroke, this jeopardised what was beginning to become a thriving cyber economy. It seems Ncube feels a need to deal only with concrete transactions in a hard currency, however valueless, that he and the government can try to control.

In June, he introduced a new Zimbabwean dollar, outlawing the use of the US dollar. This has already led to a rapid erosion of spending power, with the new currency trading at almost ten to one US dollar. He has defended his decision, although his critics remain many.

With the lack of incentives to small businesses that bridge the formal and informal economies, a huge number of families depend on salaries earned by public servants. There are about 400,000 civil servants in Zimbabwe. Given the lack of real value in the Zimbabwean dollar, they probably live on less than US$2.00 a day. They and their families, not to mention the network of relatives in the extended family, cannot survive on that.

Ncube’s fixation with control shows the dead hand of a government that has run out of ideas and, above all, trust in entrepreneurial initiative and self-creation. Nevertheless, it wishes to have control of all it surveys, even as this diminishes before its own eyes

Ncube’s astounding plan

According to an interview with Bloomberg in mid-August, Ncube said he hopes to establish a nine-member monetary policy committee that will reduce interest rates from 50%. Within 12 to 18 months, Zimbabwe plans to sell domestic bonds with a duration of as long as 30 years to fund infrastructure investment. In time, it will approach international markets, he said. How exactly any of this is to be done is yet to be explained.

Hanging over all this is the size of the debt that Zimbabwe needs to repay before investors will consider the country a viable risk for new loan liquidity. Estimates for this figure range from US$9 billion to as much as $US30 billion.

Under a debt-settlement plan, which Ncube maintains he is discussing with creditors, Zimbabwe would complete an International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff-monitored programme in January 2020. He told Bloomberg that Zimbabwe would then borrow the $1.9 billion it owes the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB) from the G7 group of industrialised nations. This would allow it to win $1 billion in debt relief from the World Bank and AfDB, which it would pay back to the G7.

But this is an astonishing strategy. It is based on the ability, and credibility, to borrow money to repay money. And there is absolutely no indication that the G7 would loan significant sums to Zimbabwe until both economic and, above all, political reforms are instituted.

Whether Zimbabwe could complete the IMF staff-monitored programme by January is a huge question in itself. The IMF conditions are not easy ones.

Having got this far, Ncube has no choice but to hope that his policies will work. He inherited a mess of gigantic proportions. It was as if the ZANU-PF ruling party, the government, and the oligarchic ruling class thought the free lunch could go on forever. Someone would always loan it more money.

Ncube realised that this could not any longer be the case. But his solution seems to be simply a new way to borrow more money. The first terrible truth is that it is not Zimbabwean money that will save Zimbabwe. The second terrible truth is that Zimbabwe’s economy may not, for some time, be saved.

Stephen Chan, Professor of World Politics, SOAS, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

South Africa and Zimbabwe seek to strengthen defence ties
Discontent swells in Zimbabwe amid crackdown, economic woes

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Discontent swells in Zimbabwe amid crackdown, economic woes – The Zimbabwean

Posted on by TSA Press

Protesters flee teargas during clashes after police banned planned rallies over austerity and rising living costs called by the opposition in Harare, Zimbabwe, on August 16 [Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters]

Harare, Zimbabwe – Emmerson Mnangagwawanted a clean break from his predecessor’s past.

Whereas Robert Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, would contravene the West diplomatically, President Mnangagwa wanted to engage. And contrary to Mugabe’s strategy of barring investors, Mnangagwa said he was open for business.

At home, when he was officially sworn into office last year following a coup to remove Mugabe, he was welcomed as the leader Zimbabwe needed, and on the diplomatic front, he was the darling of Western diplomats – a pragmatic and progressive reformer.

But almost two years on from the removal of Mugabe, the landscape from both fronts is viewed differently amid an apparent crackdown on dissent and an economy that remains weak.

On August 16 this year, anti-riot police crushed a demonstration, injuring several protesters.

Earlier, in January, more than 16 people were killed when soldiers opened fire on protesters in the aftermath of a 150 percent fuel price increase.

Several others were injured.

Last year in August, soldiers shot and killed six other opposition-supporting protesters.

In this photo from August 10, 2015, Robert Mugabe, right, greets Emmerson Mnangagwa as he arrives for Zimbabwe’s Heroes Day commemorations in Harare [Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters]

With inflation at 200 percent in June, high living costs, stagnant salaries and 90 percentunemployment, discontent against Mnangagwa’s government is rising.

“I am very unhappy with the state of affairs in the country. Life is very hard now. We want the problems solved,” said Priscah Katema, a Harare resident who does odd jobs to supplement her husband’s income.

Some observers have described Mnangagwa as being “worse” than his former mentor Mugabe, but Ibbo Mandaza, a political science academic and former government adviser, said this perspective was limited.

“The argument that Mnangagwa is worse than Mugabe is purely academic,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is because there should not be any distinction between the two. Mnangagwa was always at the centre of the security apparatus that enabled Mugabe to do all the things he did.”

After the recent anti-government protests, the European Union, which earlier threw its support behind Mnangagwa’s reforms, sent a warning.

In a joint statement, the heads of mission for France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, UK, Australia, Canada and the United States, said the “intimidation, harassment and physical attacks on human rights defenders, trade union and civil society representatives and opposition politicians – prior to, during and following the demonstration in Harare on August 16 – are cause for great concern.”

In defiance reminiscent of the Mugabe era, Nick Mangwana, information secretary and presidential spokesperson, said the EU statement undermined civilian authority and promoted anarchy.

“The government is taken aback by the intrusive and judgmental tone of the statement. The statement fails to acknowledge that the Zimbabwean High Court spoke on the issue, which rendered any action taken contrary to that judgment illegal,” he said in a statement.

What we have witnessed in Zimbabwe since President Emmerson Mnangagwa took power is a ruthless attack on human rights.

MULEYA MWANANYANDA, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR SOUTHERN AFRICA

Meanwhile, rights groups including Amnesty International have called on Zimbabwe to protect its citizens, describing a “systematic and brutal crackdown”.

“What we have witnessed in Zimbabwe since President Emmerson Mnangagwa took power is a ruthless attack on human rights, with the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association increasingly restricted and criminalised,” said Muleya Mwananyanda, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Southern Africa.

Stephen Chuma, spokesman of the Opposition MDC Alliance Youth Assembly National, said the government’s actions make Zimbabwe look like a military state.

“Blocking the people’s constitutional right to demonstrate can only aid in further exposing this regime and also buttressing our position that Emmerson Mnangagwa has turned the country into a fully-fledged military state that does not respect people’s fundamental rights,” said Chuma.

By the time of publishing, Mnangagwa had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Unperturbed by the diplomatic attacks, the 76-year-old president has accelerated a clampdown on opposition leaders and perceived enemies of the state.

Zimbabwe Fuel Prices 2

Buses in Harare queue to fill up before Zimbabwean fuel prices rise again [File: Chris Murzoni/Al Jazeera]

Opposition activists Blessing Kanotunga, MDC Youth chairperson, and Citizens Manifesto’s Tatenda Mombeyarara were abducted and assaulted last month in advance of protests, before being dumped back on the streets of Harare.

In the same period, MDC Youth Assembly National Vice Chairperson Cecilia Chimbiri was called in by the CID while Pride Mkono, a pro-democracy campaigner, was also detained and charged with attempting to subvert a constitutional government.

MDC national organising secretary Amos Chibaya was detained for failing to comply with a ban on demonstrations, and Leopold Munhende, a journalist with an online publication, was recently arrested in Harare.

Human rights lawyer Doug Coltart was also held and assaulted for filming the arrest of trade unionists, and spent a night in jail.

Even comedians have not been spared.

Armed and masked men forcefully entered the house of popular comic Samantha Kureya, known by her stage name “Gonyeti”, and abducted her.

She was reportedly driven to an unknown area and assaulted for her satirical jokes that poke fun at authorities.

But despite the threats, the opposition has refused to stop protesting, Chuma said.

“By closing the democratic space, the government is creating its own enemy,” he said.

Mnangagwa’s term comes to an end in 2023.

Mandaza, the political science academic, believes it is unlikely he will stand in power until then.

“The killings of the August 1, 2018, the stolen elections, the January killings this year, assaults on protesters, and abductions are indicative of regimes that have become very vulnerable and fragile,” he said. “They now rely on sheer force after they lost the social and political base.”

Deutsche Bank CEO Makes Good On Pledge To Piss Away 15% Of His Comp By Investing It In Deutsche Bank Stock

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Christian Sewing is really going The Full Lutheran.

When Are Lawyers To Blame For Their Clients?

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With election season prematurely upon us, lawyers across the country will gear up to run for office, and their opponents will gear up to bash them for the clientele they’ve served. Should lawyers ever be criticized for zealously defending clients? Is the justice system undermined if attorneys feel some clients are too toxic to represent?

Andy Ngo Is Journalism’s Problem

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Andy Ngo after unidentified Rose City Antifa members attacked him. (Photo by Moriah Ratner/Getty Images)

One of the most surprising bits of news from a lawsuit that the owner of Portland, Oregon, bar Cider Riot filed in May against the far-right organization Patriot Prayer is that video footage submitted as evidence seems to have led to a fall from grace for Andy Ngo, a writer who had been a rising star in conservative media.

However, a bigger question than why Ngo left his editorial position at online right-wing magazine Quillette is how he managed to rise to the heights he did in the first place. It’s an uncomfortable question for journalism, but still necessary to ask because the truth is, Andy Ngo is journalism’s problem.

Ngo raised eyebrows on Aug. 26, when he quietly removed Quillette’s name from his Twitter profile, and the magazine removed him from its masthead. Earlier that day, the Portland Mercury published an article about a pseudonymous left-wing activist who had infiltrated Patriot Prayer and filmed the group allegedly plotting a violent May 1 attack on Cider Riot, a popular leftist hangout. The video appears to show Ngo standing well within earshot of the conversation — the activist claims he overheard everything — but he didn’t include it in subsequent reports. That confirmed in the minds of his critics a longstanding suspicion that he was simply a far-right propagandist posing as a journalist.

Ngo has denied that he had knowledge of the alleged plot. Quillette editor Claire Lehmann tweeted that he had actually left the magazine already and had been off since July due to a brain hemorrhage sustained in a now infamous incident when several Antifas beat him in late June. Both have explicitly denied that Ngo’s leaving the publication was related to the video.

Still, given the timing of Ngo’s exit and the awkward way it became public, as well as his history of credibility issues, I can’t help feeling a tad skeptical. But regardless of the circumstances of his exit from the magazine, I don’t think Ngo could have gotten as far as he did were it not for a confluence of factors in politics and media in the past few years.

Those factors should be familiar. A hyperpartisan political climate. Public cynicism toward legacy news media and a perceived porousness in the relationship between reporting, analysis and opinion. The growing role of social media and crowdfunding in the dissemination of content, often with no editorial oversight. The internet’s erosion of journalism’s traditional structural barriers to entry.

Combine those elements, and you have the perfect primordial soup to give birth to a new kind of perfidious pseudo-journalist. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be considered a prototype, but Ngo is a more refined version, born of the social media age. There will undoubtedly be more like him, and it’s imperative for those of us who value journalism’s critical role in democracy to be on guard.

Miscreants and pretenders exist in every profession. Law has its pettifoggers, medicine its quacks. But Ngo is something distinct from journalism’s occasional plagiarists and fabricators. Strictly speaking, he’s a propagandist who selectively presents facts to push political narratives, but he puts on the airs of a disinterested, objective reporter.

Of course, it’s not as though Ngo’s propagandist role or credibility issues were secrets. In 2017, the student newspaper he worked for, Portland State University’s The Vanguard, fired him over a tweet that paraphrased remarks by a Muslim student in a panel discussion in a way that the newspaper said took them out of context and put the student in danger. Instead of the soul searching any responsible journalist would do, Ngo took his story to the National Review, claiming he was “fired for reporting the truth” — a claim the newspaper challenged, but that helped make him famous. In August 2018, The Wall Street Journal had to issue a correction on his op-ed about Muslim neighborhoods in London when he suggested a sign reading “alcohol-restricted zone” was due to sharia law rather than being about public drinking — something any reporter could have discovered simply by asking someone on the street. And critics have long complained that he presents videos of brawling between far-left and far-right groups in a selective way that plays up violence by the former and downplays violence by the latter – most recently when he described the clash that took place in Portland on Aug. 17. Left-wing anger at Ngo boiled over in the aforementioned June attack on Ngo, which earned him support and sympathy from figures in news media and politicians.

I should state that I deplore political violence without reservation, including the attack on Ngo. That said, it’s apparent he’s been using his injury as a ploy for attention and to position himself as a go-to expert on left-wing lawlessness. And I’m not the first person to observe that he has carved out a media career that drapes a veneer of journalism over a mix of propaganda and professional victimhood. But one of the rules of journalism is that you’re not supposed to make yourself part of the story. So any self-styled independent journalist who goes out of their way to do so should arouse suspicion and is likely in this business for the wrong reasons. Ngo’s obvious desire for attention and problems with credibility should have been red flags from the start. And to be fair, many journalists weren’t fooled.

Unfortunately, however, many other journalists were, most importantly those in positions of power and influence. They helped elevate someone who should have been unceremoniously told to find another line of work a long time ago. That happened because he told stories that fit popular narratives of an intolerant, violent left and Islam’s existential threat to the West— and all from the beguilingly compelling perspective of the openly gay son of Vietnamese refugees. I’m sure his perpetual sad puppy demeanor, dispassionate vocal delivery, and phony English accent helped too.

In the days when journalism was limited to paper and airwaves, the need to go through established outlets served a function akin to the licensure that people must obtain to practice in professions like medicine and law. As the internet, social media and crowdfunding have removed those barriers to entry, for many people a “journalist” is now almost anyone who claims to be one — a view summed up in a July 2 defense of Ngo by New York-based YouTuber Alec Bostwick. While such a democratization of the profession may seem like a good thing, it also opens the door to a lot of unscrupulous types.

Journalism’s lack of a formal system of licensure is a feature rather than a bug and certainly not a bad thing it itself, as licensing journalists is generally something one finds in authoritarian states. While that’s great from a civil liberties standpoint, the downside is that it makes it a lot harder to protect journalism from those who misuse and abuse it.

What we can — and indeed must — do as a profession is keep our eyes out for bad-faith actors and not extend them professional respectability they don’t deserve. In other words, while the First Amendment’s freedom of the press applies to all, being accepted as a journalist should be a privilege rather than a right.

Alaric DeArment is a New York-based reporter at a sister publication of Above The Law. The opinions herein are entirely his own.

‘I Am Alive’: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Ready For Upcoming Supreme Court Term

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

[T]his audience can see that I am alive. I am on my way to being very well.

I love my job. It’s the best and the hardest job I ever had. It has kept me going through four cancer bouts. Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains I just know that I have to read this set of briefs, go over the draft opinion, so I have to surmount whatever is going on in my body and concentrate on the court’s work.

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in remarks given during an appearance at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., where she commented not just on her recent recovery from radiation for pancreatic cancer, but her preparedness for the upcoming Supreme Court term.

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.