Over on everybody’s ‘favourite’ sound bite social media – X-Twitter – a whole lot of X’ses are being sent out around the EFF’s Julius Malema singing ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’ at the EFF’s 10th Birthday bash this past weekend.
One of the luminaries of our Justice System – Preofessor Thuli Madonsela weighed in with a legally focussed commment that, inevitably, resulted in many strident dissenting voices that attacked the messenger and not the actual problem.
It is most frustrating when dealing with emotionally charged people – which is understandable after most had seen their R2 Million Rand Watch, Champagne Guzzling hero who got their hearts and bodies pumping with adrenaline after a stirring song and dance routine followed by a highly symbolic raising up to the heavens of a lone figure with a raised fist making a power salute…
After that, mere words of reconciliation and fact will not fly in the face of pure, raw, aggression flowing out of the theatre of war we used to call the FNB Stadium.
Professor Thuli Madonsela said:
In South Africa, if you are a state employee in Parliament or anywhere else, the Constitution enjoins you to ensure your actions & speech:
- Heal the divisions of the past
- Advance equality in pursuit of social justice
- Uphold and not violate human dignity
- Comply with Ubuntu
Ubuntu is not expressly provided for in the 1996 constitution though it was in the 1993 Interim Constitution. The Constitutional Court, which is the ultimate guardian of the Constitution has confirmed that Ubuntu remains implied. E.g. Beadica case.
When a state employee acts or speaks in a manner that is contrary to their constitutional duties and relevant code of conduct, you may lodge an ethics violation complaint with a relevant ethics body, the Public Protector or the SAHRC. You may also litigate
You will never move forward if you don’t know where you are going and where you are.The past remains with us, it never left and will only leave us when we honestly and earnestly address the unjustly manufactured inequalities of its time. Check Justice Cameron’s famous quote in Daniels v Scribante.
Justice Cameron’s words in University of Stellenbosch Legal Aid Clinic: “Since Hyundai, it has been gold-plate doctrine in this Court that judges must embrace interpretations of legislation that fall within constitutional bounds over those that do not, provided that the interpretation can be reasonably ascribed to the section. Where a legislative provision is reasonably capable of a meaning that places it within constitutional bounds, it should be preserved.”
Justice Cameron on history:
- “But the first judgment [in Daniels v Scribante] does more than despatch the dispute. It also gives voice to history: an aching and, for me, shaming, account of dispossession from land of black people by white people – with the grief and pain and dislocation and shocking material deprivation this led to. This serves, in the word the first judgment chooses, as interpretative background to the case’s adjudication.”
- “When important things are being said, when insufficiently heard truths are being spoken, it is bad to hide behind the indeterminacies of history and the inevitable incompleteness and partiality of its telling.”
Alan Straton
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