Uruguayan business man and entrepreneur Dr Gaston Savoi speaks candidly about his decision to immigrate to South Africa, his commitment to investing in the country and despite the legal battle he now faces, optimism about the future.
When an astute businessman sees opportunity in a boisterous and emerging economy, he is likely to explore his options for investment. When a man persuades his family, colleagues and friends to invest their lives and livelihoods in a country, it is no longer a cool, calculated risk but a matter of the heart. Dr Gaston Savoi has lived in France, Brazil and Argentina, due to his father being transferred to these countries for business and finally settled in Uruguay. Dr Savoi speaks fluent English, Portuguese, French, Italian and Spanish and considers himself a "proudly world citizen". What then drew him to South Africa?
The roots of his life-changing decision lie in what he sees as a bond between South America and South Africa that may be separated by the Atlantic, but on all other counts, are "blood brothers".
"There is a connection on a deep level" he says. "Africa loves colours, loves music. Africa speaks loudly. The people are friendly. They open the doors of their homes to you. We in South America are very similar to South Africa. We have a lot of influence from Africa in culture and in our genetic heritage. I believe this gives us a close understanding."
His gestures are open and expansive when he speaks. It is only part of his charisma. The rest is down to what, in old fashioned terms, might be called a "dapper" style; a combination of sartorial elegance, urbane manner and a deep voice that takes English and turns it into a rich, allegorical narrative. He grins under a slightly rakish moustache and there it is; the portrait of a man whose handshake and characteristic embrace signals the beginning of both a friendship and a business partnership.
This is the same Savoi who, back in 1973 at the age of 21 years old, boldly brokered a financial deal for a small company with great ideas but no capital. To this day, 37 years later, he remains close friends with the founders.
Dr Savoi obtained his degree in Sao Pablo, Brazil, married Gilda Brant de Carvalho and in the years to follow, would take the first steps in developing pharmaceutical factories that manufactured raw materials for human and veterinary use, making key breakthrough in research and development, and becoming a world player in the field. These ventures formed the initial basis to his growing wealth.
As a couple, he and Gilda also founded the first Arabian horse insemination laboratory in Uruguay. Life for the couple was about balance - the practical, the aesthetic and the emotional, which included starting a family. Their three sons, Philippe, Rodrigo and Guillermo and daughter Carolina ultimately joined the family business and by the mid 90s, South Africa was firmly on their radar as a frequent holiday destination. The bush, Cape Town and its people had begun to work its magic.
"When an aeroplane arrives in South Africa, you see this sun coming up and reflecting the clouds. Before you put a foot on the continent you are starting to fall in love with it," he says. The process, which he says begins as an "infatuation", turns to something deeper. Beyond the bush, animal life and the lure big-sky country, Dr Savoi was acutely aware that South Africa offered something much more.
"It's a country with a history and a fantastic infrastructure," he adds. "South Africa for me is a First World country but with everything that you can get from the wild. You are able to go anywhere in two hours," gesturing with his arms opened wide to reinforce the point. "A few kilometres and I am in the middle of the bush, the mountains, game reserves, rivers and deserts. There is no other country I know of that has the versatility and diversity in one place."
"I have an open mind to different cultures, to appreciate different roots, and made the decision to live here and not just be in transit."
At the same time, Dr Savoi was seeing the beginning of what he describes as "cracks" in the banking system in South America and a growing instability there. "What we are experiencing now as a result of what is happening in Europe and North America, South America felt in 2000." Dr Savoi felt that he was in what he calls a "poll" position and ahead was an open track that led, quite obviously, to an emerging economy with intriguing potential.
But no business decision is made in this family without consultation.
"You always need to think in terms of family," he says. The Savoi family is extremely close with major business and life decisions taken around a table not a boardroom. Dr Savoi felt that they were all turning a significant corner and that they needed to be pro-active about their futures. They had already experienced the inexorable pull of South Africa through their world traveller's eyes but he says, "sometimes, destiny shows the way to a move and chooses the moment. I considered the age of my daughter and my three sons. They would look to get married some day and that maybe it was the time for us to take what was not an easy decision but neither was it a tough one. After all, I was not going to mine gold in the Yukon! They saw the scenario through the same eyes and I proceeded to motivate the move to invest in South Africa."
Gaston Savoi did not come empty handed.
With 37 years working in the health industry in manufacturing pharmaceutical API's (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) Savoi's companies also manufactured water purification systems and mobile gas generating units. He saw the opportunity to set up a company in South Africa, attracting foreign investment and contribute to the national production of a vital product that had the potential to change the lives of millions of South Africans denied access to fresh water because of inaccessible or contaminated sources. There was another product that the Group had developed in South America that would save lives. One of the big problems faced by countries with an outlying rural population that relied on smaller hospitals and clinics for health care, was the ready availability of medical air and oxygen. Transporting cylinders to outlying areas in South America on poor roads and at the vagaries of frequent strikes left the rural population vulnerable. Units that generate medical oxygen and medical air on site meant avoiding the risks related to non-delivery of a vital resource. The system also has a positive impact on the environment (as shown in an European study) as CO2 is reduced by reducing the transportation of cylinders.
But these plans lay in the future.
First came the Savoi family's move here, one that puzzled many well heeled South Africans whose children were members of the white diaspora to the UK, Australia and the US. For here was a man with wealth and the privilege of choice, deciding to commit everything to a country with what had, at best an "uncertain future".
Savoi simply didn"t see the new South Africa this way.
"I took a decision and my immediate family supported the decision.
That has as a lot to do with his role within the family. "To be a father is naturally a result of biological process, but to be friend to your sons, and vice versa, that is something that needs to be cultivated. To keep the respect between the generations is not easy unless there are no fences and no walls. It is the same relationship that I have with my father. I am not embarrassed to say that it is about real love."
Although the plans were to bring his immediate family to a new continent and a new life, it was not without some pain. "You need to remember that it did not include my extended family - father, my mother, my mother in law, my father in law here, and my sister - therefore it was a tough decision - but less tough if you combine it with taking what you feel deep down, is the right decision. I am sure that I took it."
This growing set of ties to South Africa – including an application for permanent residence for his whole family - underpinned Savoi's first significant commitment in putting down roots. In 2001, the Group bought a 50% share (R150 million rand investment) in Shamwari Holdings through foreign investment, later to be known as the Mantis Collection of Boutique Hotels and Game Reserves, the world renowned hospitality group that included Shamwari Game Reserve established by Adrian Gardiner. The partnership with Gardiner also had financial implications. With no track record in South Africa, the Group had no credit line with local banks, making foreign investment crucial going forward. Although the family had farming in their blood, Savoi had no personal experience in the hospitality industry and running a game reserve. He saw the move as a chance to hand over his core business to his children and take up a personal challenge, moving not to a new career per se, but more of an active "retirement". "To have gypsy spirit, does not mean that you are gypsy. To say that you"re a world citizen that does not mean that you don"t have roots." In true Savoi style, the initial connection with Shamwari was indirect. On a flight to SA, he struck up a conversation with fellow passenger Peter Fleck (former rugby player Robbie Fleck's father).
In the conversation that ensued, one that ranged from family to business and Savoi's growing feelings for South Africa, was the subject of a game lodge. Peter became the catalyst to a series of meetings both in South Africa and South America, with amongst others Dr Ian Player. "I always think that it's very important when you intend to take a step like that, to know where people are coming from and how they do business. It's a matter of logic – and culture. But also the differences are important. I always say “what happens to the red if everybody likes the blue”?
A gentleman's agreement then led to a due diligence report, a formal partnership and a mounting excitement about potential new markets, resulting from one of his son's astute comment that South American tourism to SA, was largely neglected. There was much to be done to foster stronger ties.
Business ties established, and a future vision mapped out, the Group went on to further develop the historic Steenberg Estate in Constantia and the 54 000 hectare Sanbona Wildlife Reserve at the foot of the Warmwaterberg Mountains in the Little Karoo. The reserve's white lion project, was given world coverage through Animal planet and it's one which Savoi is justifiably proud of to this day.
The SA lifestyle proved an irresistible force. "We live a supposed 650 thousand hours," says Savoi, "that is our life. I am clear that some of these hours need to be enjoyed during our journey here."
It was a journey on many levels and not simply a destination.
Although the Group successfully sold their shares back to Adrian Gardiner in 2005, Dr Savoi continued to pursue the core business that he had established in South America; water purification, oxygen and health products.
"We brought our technology and our intellectual property through foreign investment to the country - and to the continent. With this, came the will and the effort to build a fantastic first world nutritional plant," says Dr Savoi. "Over the years with Mantis, I had the honour and the opportunity to meet many important players in the South African government and was guided by them on of how to deal with government as a supplier. We understood absolutely that we needed to go through a process. It is something we understand because we have had a similar scenario for decades in Brazil. We not only understand the system but respect what is a natural empowerment, because we believe in our culture there can not be no more colonialism. We are not an orange to be squeezed, to take the juice from the orange and take the seeds. If you want to come to enjoy a country and its benefits for today, tomorrow and the future you must have respect for the local owners of the country. I take my authority from South Africa but it stops in front of you," deferring to the laws and customs of the country.
"I am not a citizen. I can"t vote. Therefore, I must respect you, I must be diplomatic. I must respect the country's policy of Black Economic Empowerment. We needed to have South African partners who could add real value to the process but to get government work required networking."
There is no doubt that the government tender process, now under such intense scrutiny, is a complicated one. The right partners, the processes to follow, the legitmacy of commissions paid for work secured, is integral to Dr Savoi's current challenges. What happens now, and in the years it may take to untangle what Dr Savoi calls a "spagetti putanesca", must take his course. He contuines to appear in court at hearings with dignity, having endured what appeared to be a highly irregular decision to keep him jailed for several days in Kimberley, and despite having posted substantial bail.
"It is a "live and learn" scenario he believes. "What if I could have imagined that all our trust and effort would be challenged because we followed the created rules of the country." He lets the notion hang. "One thing I am deeply sure of is that we have not done anything wrong. I did not only bring my family here remember, but motivated other families and foreign investors to come here too. These families and investors came trusting me because some of them have been working for me for 10, 20 years. They came here to transfer skills and add value to the country, then married here and have South African babies. I myself have six Proudly South African grandchildren.
"If you ask me today where I think I failed, I say this; I am not a perfect man but I am a perfectionsit. I think that I failed as you fail when you are in love. When you are in love all that strong sentiment creates a weakness somewhere. There are two issues at play here; the first one is that I definitely underestimated the strong power of a monopoly, in the country."
Dr Savoi saw that there were major opportunities and alternatives to a single supplier of services and a commodity. "I did not ever see our company as a substitute monopoly. It's simply not in our culture, in our South American history. We are born as a nationalist people. I saw the opportunity then to produce our equipment here instead of importing it from South America. We empowered many people in this country and directly employed 150. Sadly, we have recently had to retrench 60% of our staff.
"Suddenly," says Dr Savoi, "we appear to have crossed a road that is not allowed to be crossed, but nobody warned us."
Dr Savoi's second caveat has to do with not knowing enough about a local network to do business.
"I am sure that if you were to invest in Brazil, because you love the country, its people, its spirit, the friendship, the music - you love everything - and you decide that by using your skills, you could reduce poverty … but that you have to have a "national power" base to do so, you would take advice. "The advice would be to find strategic partners, and offer strategic shares in your company. You would ask what key people to be introduced to and someone – because you do not know yourself – would choose the right people you should know. You would be reliant on this strategic advice. And obviously one conducts business strictly in accordance with the law and on advice of the professional advisers of the company:- lawyers and auditors."
By all accounts, this is the pattern that Dr Savoi followed on advice from those "in the know" and which is now the subject of his pending court case. "I am a businessman but it seems to me that I have become part of a witch hunt."
The docket that started the ball rolling happened to be from one of Dr Savoi's direct competitors. "How is it, "he asks, "that you can be part of a national tender for business when you are the sole supplier of the goods and services?"
Despite the fight Dr Savoi still has to face over the coming months he remains optimistic about his future here.
"We intend to stay here, to contribute to what we can. We have other projects in the pipeline besides water purification plants and gas generation units. We have our work to carry out bringing skills and intellectual property to help factories reduce the relience on importations. The goal is self dependence."
"I have immense respect for South Africans and what they have achieved but sometimes I feel that perhaps people cannot see what they have, what they have built. One day, the whole world will understand what we (South Africa) have. Perhaps you cannot see what you have until you lose it. You need to take stock. I did. And what I understood, what I saw - and still do - is a deep synergy with my vision of things and what can be achieved in this country."
Please direct all questions in writing to Lynn Giles - lynng@draftfcb.co.za. Dr Savoi is currently not available for comment or interviews.
For further information regarding the current court case, please forward your requests in writing to Rachelle Bricout of Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs - rachelle@create-a-stir.co.za
Source: Intaka
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Mohammed Bouazizi: the dutiful son whose death changed Tunisia's fate
Mohammed Bouazizi's 16-year-old sister, Basma, remembers her brother for the little gifts he would bring when he returned home from work as a fruit seller in the city of Sidi Bouzid.
The world knows Mohammed Bouazizi for something else: as the poor and desperate young man, harassed by the authorities, who set fire to himself in this town in central Tunisia, inspiring a revolution that brought down the country's dictator, an act still reverberating through the Arab world. "He was funny," says Basma, "and generous." She stops for a moment to recall the elder brother who once walked her to school. "When he would get angry with me he always came afterwards and asked me to forgive him."
His mother, Manoubia, points to where her late son slept in the tiny white-walled bedroom he shared with his younger brother, Karim. It is picture-less and stacked with a few cushions and bedclothes.
There is nothing here to suggest the life now gone, to associate a name thrust out of obscurity into the excruciating kind of fame that came with Bouazizi's act. His mother takes a grey wool jacket out of a wardrobe, the room's sole item of furniture, and presses her face into it, weeping. "This was Mohammed's."
Visiting the dusty town of Sidi Bouzid it seems there are two Mohammed Bouazizis. There is the simple young man of 26 who worked so hard to send his sisters to school and university, selling fruit on the roadside to earn $5 a day. A young man who was often required to pay bribes worth more than he could earn in a day to the local authorities to set up his stall because they would not give him a permit. Who on other days – like the day he set himself on fire – had his business shut down on a whim.
Then there is the Mohammed Bouazizi who has already been elevated to the status of a myth, transformed into an Arab Jan Palach, invested with a meaning more national, social and political than personal. A Czech student, Palach killed himself in the same way in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But where his act was overtly political, Bouazizi's death was an expression of a frustration that could not be articulated.
Attention has been visited on his town, as well as on Bouazizi. A place once largely unheard of, through social media sites such as Twitter it became the hash-tagged centre point of reference for Tunisia's revolution for a wider world, its name a slogan in its own right inside Tunisia.
A picture of Bouazizi's face has been affixed to the mosaic-tiled monument outside the town's municipal offices where he was abused and slapped by a female worker when he went to complain about not being allowed to work. The date of his self-immolation – which burned him horribly but did not kill him immediately – is painted on walls with the graffiti announcing the town as "a place of freedom".
His friends and family remember him as a young man of simple tastes and pleasures, who had no time to follow football or music, who cherished his family and wanted to get married. His ambition was to buy the pickup truck for which he was saving, so he could drive to the market to buy his fruit, instead of having to walk.
It is, perhaps, Bouazizi's lack of obvious political attachments, either secular or religious, that has transformed him beyond a familiar kind of victimhood into an everyman with a wider resonance in the Arab world. Hardworking, optimistic and generous, impoverished but wanting to get on, he was an ordinary man ground down by a pernicious system.
"He was so happy that morning. Happy! Happy!" his mother recalls. She says he had never talked of feeling suicidal, only of being frustrated at his treatment by the town's officials. "He didn't sleep much because of his work. Only a few hours, but he was happy. He had gone to the market at 10 o'clock the night before to buy his produce, pushing his handcart, and then left the house at eight in the morning after his breakfast."
That was the last time she saw her son conscious. Ms Bouazizi heard what happened first from a neighbour. Her son, she was told at first, was sick.
There was no mention of how, furious at his mistreatment by the police and at the municipality that refused to allow him in to complain, he had doused himself in petrol outside the gates, out in the street where the cars pass by. She learned all of that later, and when she did, she fainted.
The local hospital could not cope with Bouazizi's terrible burns, so he was taken first to Sfax, more than 70 miles away, and then, as the government's interest in his case grew in proportion to the demonstrations that took up his name, to a hospital in Tunis.
His mother says: "We are poor people in Sidi Bouzid. We don't have money but we have our dignity, and his dignity was taken away with that slap and those wrong words." And while it is the son's name that has become famous, drawing journalists from across the globe to the single-storey, four-room house where he lived, the story is as much about his family as it is about him.
For what the Bouazizis represent is something instantly familiar across the Arab world: poor, decent people from the hard-scrabble countryside outside the town – a village named Sidi Salah, where Bouazizi went to school in a one-room country classroom. A family who moved to the town to look for work.
It is the story, too, of a mother who worked as a day labourer in the fields, while Bouazizi pitched his trade as a street salesman, who wanted to help their family better themselves through education in a country where wealth and opportunity has been concentrated for decades in the hands of a tiny elite.
Where people such as the Bouazizis are looked down upon, abused. "When he had free time, he stayed at home with the family," says Basma. "His dream was to see his sisters go to university."
Her mother adds: "He had that dream himself when he was younger but he had a brother and sisters to support, so he quit school at 18 to work. He loved what he did. It was his calling, and people liked my son."
There is the sound of a woman's voice outside the house, declamatory and angry. A friend of the family explains it is Bouazizi's aunt Mouniya. She is directing her fury at the Tunisian men who stand silent: "Why have the Tunisian journalists taken so long to come?" she demands. "When foreign journalists have found us? Why did the mayor not come to Mohammed's funeral?"
Some of the family members look embarrassed. They are not, they have explained, political people. Indeed, when President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, driven out by the revolution sparked largely by her son's act, came to see her son in hospital, Ms Bouazizi says that she was happy.
The hurt done to her son, she felt, had been recognised at last. "Despite his death, I am proud of my son, as all the Arabs are for his part in the Tunisian revolution." But she does not want other young Arab men in other countries to do what her son did – although some have. "The message I would give to the young men who have burned themselves is you should not do it just to get your voices heard."
Outside Sidi Bouzid, about 12 miles along the main highway, there is a dirt road signposted for Sidi Salah.
The cemetery is a little way beyond the village. There are a few trees and a line of ochre hills in the distance.
Bouazizi's grave is a grey concrete block with two pretty yellow bowls set in it, filled with water. In front of the tomb kneel his uncle Amar and two cousins, mourning.
There is no obvious inscription, but there are more journalists than family, and more arriving.
Mohammed Bouazizi's name will not be forgotten soon.
Source: Guardian
The world knows Mohammed Bouazizi for something else: as the poor and desperate young man, harassed by the authorities, who set fire to himself in this town in central Tunisia, inspiring a revolution that brought down the country's dictator, an act still reverberating through the Arab world. "He was funny," says Basma, "and generous." She stops for a moment to recall the elder brother who once walked her to school. "When he would get angry with me he always came afterwards and asked me to forgive him."
His mother, Manoubia, points to where her late son slept in the tiny white-walled bedroom he shared with his younger brother, Karim. It is picture-less and stacked with a few cushions and bedclothes.
There is nothing here to suggest the life now gone, to associate a name thrust out of obscurity into the excruciating kind of fame that came with Bouazizi's act. His mother takes a grey wool jacket out of a wardrobe, the room's sole item of furniture, and presses her face into it, weeping. "This was Mohammed's."
Visiting the dusty town of Sidi Bouzid it seems there are two Mohammed Bouazizis. There is the simple young man of 26 who worked so hard to send his sisters to school and university, selling fruit on the roadside to earn $5 a day. A young man who was often required to pay bribes worth more than he could earn in a day to the local authorities to set up his stall because they would not give him a permit. Who on other days – like the day he set himself on fire – had his business shut down on a whim.
Then there is the Mohammed Bouazizi who has already been elevated to the status of a myth, transformed into an Arab Jan Palach, invested with a meaning more national, social and political than personal. A Czech student, Palach killed himself in the same way in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But where his act was overtly political, Bouazizi's death was an expression of a frustration that could not be articulated.
Attention has been visited on his town, as well as on Bouazizi. A place once largely unheard of, through social media sites such as Twitter it became the hash-tagged centre point of reference for Tunisia's revolution for a wider world, its name a slogan in its own right inside Tunisia.
A picture of Bouazizi's face has been affixed to the mosaic-tiled monument outside the town's municipal offices where he was abused and slapped by a female worker when he went to complain about not being allowed to work. The date of his self-immolation – which burned him horribly but did not kill him immediately – is painted on walls with the graffiti announcing the town as "a place of freedom".
His friends and family remember him as a young man of simple tastes and pleasures, who had no time to follow football or music, who cherished his family and wanted to get married. His ambition was to buy the pickup truck for which he was saving, so he could drive to the market to buy his fruit, instead of having to walk.
It is, perhaps, Bouazizi's lack of obvious political attachments, either secular or religious, that has transformed him beyond a familiar kind of victimhood into an everyman with a wider resonance in the Arab world. Hardworking, optimistic and generous, impoverished but wanting to get on, he was an ordinary man ground down by a pernicious system.
"He was so happy that morning. Happy! Happy!" his mother recalls. She says he had never talked of feeling suicidal, only of being frustrated at his treatment by the town's officials. "He didn't sleep much because of his work. Only a few hours, but he was happy. He had gone to the market at 10 o'clock the night before to buy his produce, pushing his handcart, and then left the house at eight in the morning after his breakfast."
That was the last time she saw her son conscious. Ms Bouazizi heard what happened first from a neighbour. Her son, she was told at first, was sick.
There was no mention of how, furious at his mistreatment by the police and at the municipality that refused to allow him in to complain, he had doused himself in petrol outside the gates, out in the street where the cars pass by. She learned all of that later, and when she did, she fainted.
The local hospital could not cope with Bouazizi's terrible burns, so he was taken first to Sfax, more than 70 miles away, and then, as the government's interest in his case grew in proportion to the demonstrations that took up his name, to a hospital in Tunis.
His mother says: "We are poor people in Sidi Bouzid. We don't have money but we have our dignity, and his dignity was taken away with that slap and those wrong words." And while it is the son's name that has become famous, drawing journalists from across the globe to the single-storey, four-room house where he lived, the story is as much about his family as it is about him.
For what the Bouazizis represent is something instantly familiar across the Arab world: poor, decent people from the hard-scrabble countryside outside the town – a village named Sidi Salah, where Bouazizi went to school in a one-room country classroom. A family who moved to the town to look for work.
It is the story, too, of a mother who worked as a day labourer in the fields, while Bouazizi pitched his trade as a street salesman, who wanted to help their family better themselves through education in a country where wealth and opportunity has been concentrated for decades in the hands of a tiny elite.
Where people such as the Bouazizis are looked down upon, abused. "When he had free time, he stayed at home with the family," says Basma. "His dream was to see his sisters go to university."
Her mother adds: "He had that dream himself when he was younger but he had a brother and sisters to support, so he quit school at 18 to work. He loved what he did. It was his calling, and people liked my son."
There is the sound of a woman's voice outside the house, declamatory and angry. A friend of the family explains it is Bouazizi's aunt Mouniya. She is directing her fury at the Tunisian men who stand silent: "Why have the Tunisian journalists taken so long to come?" she demands. "When foreign journalists have found us? Why did the mayor not come to Mohammed's funeral?"
Some of the family members look embarrassed. They are not, they have explained, political people. Indeed, when President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, driven out by the revolution sparked largely by her son's act, came to see her son in hospital, Ms Bouazizi says that she was happy.
The hurt done to her son, she felt, had been recognised at last. "Despite his death, I am proud of my son, as all the Arabs are for his part in the Tunisian revolution." But she does not want other young Arab men in other countries to do what her son did – although some have. "The message I would give to the young men who have burned themselves is you should not do it just to get your voices heard."
Outside Sidi Bouzid, about 12 miles along the main highway, there is a dirt road signposted for Sidi Salah.
The cemetery is a little way beyond the village. There are a few trees and a line of ochre hills in the distance.
Bouazizi's grave is a grey concrete block with two pretty yellow bowls set in it, filled with water. In front of the tomb kneel his uncle Amar and two cousins, mourning.
There is no obvious inscription, but there are more journalists than family, and more arriving.
Mohammed Bouazizi's name will not be forgotten soon.
Source: Guardian
Monday, January 17, 2011
The Silence of the Lawyers
Speech by Adv Jeremy Gauntlett, SC, to the Conference of the Society of Law Teachers, Stellenbosch, January 17 2011
Thank you for the honour this invitation constitutes. It stirred many feelings in me. The first was doubt as to how your Society took that decision. I say this because I know the way my own profession takes decisions. This is best exemplified by the decision of the Johannesburg Bar Council some 40 years ago.
A well-regarded but cantankerous judge was hospitalised. A delegation was despatched by the Bar Council to his hospital bedside. The leader cleared his throat and told the judge that the Johannesburg Bar Council had mandated him to convey two messages. The first was that he was asked to wish the judge on behalf of the Johannesburg Bar a speedy recovery. The second was to tell the judge that this was on a vote of six to five.
My second feeling was one of nostalgia: nostalgia for those who taught me here, and who either as teachers or as fellow students became my friends for life; and those who taught me, or with whom I worked, in my own postgraduate life. Allow me to mention JC de Wet, Willem Joubert and Tony Honoré - now in his 62nd year of teaching at Oxford.
I and many of my colleagues in practice owe an inexpressible debt to you and to your predecessors. It concerns me that often law teachers seem to doubt the worth of what they do. Their task is ancient and vital. As CP Snow writes of Cambridge in his elegaic novel about university ambition, The Masters, it "[i]s hard not to think of other men walking as we did, of the chain of lives going back so long a time, of others walking those same narrow streets in the rain".
That is not to say that law teachers at times lack brutality. I remember Sir Rupert Cross, great writer and teacher on the law of evidence, handing back collections (essays) at Oxford and saying: "I know you can't help your laziness, but you should really try to do something about your stupidity".
When you invite a practitioner to speak, you should know that his own scholarship will not have been sustained by the bits of writing and lecturing which only earlier years at the Bar readily allowed. So I do not venture a scholarly theme.
On the other hand, if you expect me to speak about things that matter to the profession, I shall do so, but only in part. For what I want to talk about today is a common malaise: a lack of critical faculty not merely in the Faculty, but across the face of legal life in South Africa. My thesis is that, for all lawyers, there are disturbing developments about which we are insufficiently articulate and active.
I have often thought that the trouble with political revolution, velvet or otherwise, is that it gives rise to the same illusions as university graduation. There is the sense of attainment and finality, of a status achieved and no more to be learnt or done. I believe the converse is true. It is just a beginning. That is true of the commencement of constitutionalism in 1994.
Let me illustrate my point with scattered examples from three different areas of our shared complacency. The first concerns adjudication. The second concerns legal practice. And the third concerns you, law teachers, what you do in legal education and what we, the legal profession, do or should ourselves do in legal education.
Time does not permit today to speak in detail of the many challenges with which I believe courts in Southern Africa are confronted. I would however like to say two things in this respect. The first is that it is time to end an approach which is insufficiently rigorous in its scrutiny of the judgments of courts, and how they function.
I do not mean by this that there should be anything less than professional respect for judges, and least of all that there should be the kind of attacks on courts, chiefly by political figures, which from time to time have been manifested.
But other than the writing of David Dyzenhaus, Stu Woolman and Jonathan Lewis, in the tradition of John Dugard, Tony Mathews and Barend van Niekerk, and later Fink Haysom, Clive Plasket and Etienne Mureinik, what probing critique has there been in the last five years of the work of the Constitutional Court?
Those of you who are public lawyers may not agree with it all. You may or may not agree with Jonathan Lewis when he describes the output of the Constitution Court in recent years as "evidenced by an atavistic sentimentality", "outcome-based" and "mock-Solomonic".[1] But then we would all benefit if you said so.
Do you have nothing to say when the Constitutional Court, in the New Clicks case,[2] produced 446 pages of judgments (deciding the matter, like the Johannesburg Bar Council, "by six to five").
Why have you not criticised the refusal by Justice Sachs in the Sidumo case[3] to join Justice Ngcobo and others in determining whether the right in issue was a labour right or an administrative justice right, he urging a "move away from unduly rigid compartmentalisation so as to allow judicial reasoning to embrace fluid concepts of hybridity and permeability"? Do you share my inability to understand language like that, and the concern that it is inexact because the reasoning is not rigorous?
This is not a matter of words, although as lawyers we know that there can scarcely be expressed thought without them. As Lord Hoffmann has written,[4] our legal lives are, as TS Eliot suggested, essentially an "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings".
No, what we are concerned with is the lack of legal clarity. And as Lord Bingham has recently written in his wonderful book on the rule of law,[5] which I commend to all of you, one of the first requisites for the rule of law is clarity in the law.
The consequence, we have seen too often in recent years, has been decisions in which one battles to find a ratio, when there is a self-indulgent multiplicity of voices, and when, as Nugent JA stated in Makambi v Member of Executive Council,[6] various Constitutional Court decisions on the same issue require the courts to go "in diametrically opposed directions".
Beyond this, there are other institutional issues relating to the courts. One is the gross disparity in funding. The Constitutional Court draws on R8 million in funding for its library. The Supreme Court of Appeal, having to cover all fields in the law, submitted a budget for R1,2 million this year. It has received just R100 000. That includes acquisitions for the chambers of the 22 judges. Obviously no text books can be bought, or subscriptions to law journals sustained.
The Johannesburg High Court is in a similar crisis. Yet in recent months we found R71 million to subvent a gathering of world youth on the not-new topic of imperialism. It was Heine who said (with deadly prescience) that the nation that begins by burning books ends by burning people. Perhaps we can say that the nation that begins by disparaging legal scholarship risks renouncing law itself.
Another continuing concern is how we choose our judges. It is probably unnecessary for me in this regard to disclose the interest I have: that in the past my own nominations both to the Constitutional Court and to the High Court have, to the undisguised relief of my creditors, been rejected. I do not speak with rancour on the matter, but equally I cannot avoid speaking. There are matters we need to consider.
I would hope that all of us are committed to the fundamental transformation of our legal system. By that I mean the betterment of the system, in all its attributes, so that it is both closely congruent with and an effective vehicle for the new constitutional dispensation introduced in 1993.
I stress "betterment", because as Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia has reminded us, transformation does not just mean change, it means change for the better. Other than the Bar, who contributes to researching candidacies for the Bench? Should your Society not have a review committee to do just that, to offer an objective assessment of their academic worth, judgments or other legal writing, and to offer informed criticism of candidates to the JSC?
Countries differ widely, and I accept readily that we have imperatives of our own. I am not a believer that addressing the makeup of the Bench could await the slow evolution of passing years. But that does not prevent us from asking questions regarding the contrast for example between the House of Lords where the 12 Lords of Appeal in Ordinary on the last figures I saw[7] had on average 14 years of judicial experience before being appointed to that court; in Canada, 12 years; while in South Africa, fully six of the 11 members of the Constitutional Court had no judicial experience before joining the court with the remaining five averaging four years judicial experience each.
Can it be said that certain of last year's appointments reflect a continuing disregard for discernible judicial excellence?
Another concern is the output of our top court. In 2008, the Constitutional Court heard 22 cases. The Supreme Court of Canada heard 82, the House of Lords 102 appeals in 2005 and 94 in 2006. In each of 2006 and 2007 one member of the Constitutional Court wrote only two judgments, another produced only three in each of 2005, 2006 and 2007.[8]
The reason why these questions are important is that, as you know, it seems set that the Constitutional Court is to become the apex court in South Africa, for all matters. I have never understood how 11 judges, sitting en banc, could perform this task physically. Eleven may be the optimal number for Man United, but it is not for a court. And if they cease to sit en banc, one faces the prospect of inconsistent precedents, already a serious concern in the Supreme Court of Appeal in recent years as its numbers has grown. Nor do I understand the rationale.
A very deliberate policy choice was made in 1993 not to have complete integration of the courts, placing the Constitutional Court at the top but exclusively concerned with constitutional law. Some of us at the time believed, and wrote, that this was a wrong turn, and that we should have followed the examples of Botswana, Canada, India, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, to quote just a few ready examples.
We needed, we said (and the late Chief Justice Corbett was one), to recognise the fact that the law is indivisible. But the turn was taken in the road, and consequences follow. These include the selection of judges over the past 17 years on the basis that they would only adjudicate constitutional matters, and therefore their lack of involvement in prior professional life in wide areas of private law until now mattered less than it otherwise might. Now all must change for the highest court - except those selected on the contrary premise.
The full debate in this regard is a considerable one, and we cannot have it today. But I use it to illustrate an area of deafening silence, where one sees and hears very little, in the legal profession, in the ranks of the judiciary (although obvious constraints apply there) and above all, amongst those of you who write and teach in the field.
There is a yet worse silence regarding adjudication. This is far more concrete than the institutional issues I have just raised regarding South African courts. It concerns the suspension of a vital institution created in international law by solemn treaty obligation between the members of the South African Development Community (SADC).
The Treaty itself contemplates the creation of a regional Tribunal, its role being to adjudicate disputes rooted in international law arising in the region. The Treaty itself makes important provision for international human rights and the rule of law. It was to be expected that at some stage a dispute would arise, and so it did.
Let me give you three examples of the kind of work the Tribunal has done in the short period of three years that it has effectively been functioning.
The first concerns a man called Luke Tembani, the first black Zimbabwean (if one must use the description) ever to obtain freehold title to agricultural land in that country. He did that in 1980. He built up a considerable and successful farming enterprise, employing many, and with enough of a sense of community as to build a school on his farm providing education for over 300 children in the district. He borrowed some money from Zimbabwe's Land Bank.
He was troubled, but not unduly so, when the onset of hyperinflation from 2000 saw monthly statements in which the interest on his debt achieved absurd proportions. Shortly the interest exceeded the (considerable) market capital value of his thriving farm. He tried to negotiate, but the Land Bank's calculator was inexorable. (Behind the calculator, it seems, there was a roving eye which had fallen on his farm.)
What was invoked against him was a statutory provision very similar to the one which was struck down in this country in the Chief Lesapo case[9] in the Constitutional Court. The offensive provision was that an entity like the Land Bank would be permitted to adjudicate in its back rooms an amount said to be owing, and have this certified as a judgment debt.
Under such measures, the courts are completely bypassed. Invoking the right to access to courts protected under the SADC Treaty, and quoting the very useful Constitutional Court decision in Chief Lesapo, we succeeded in obtaining an order from the Tribunal that that provision was inconsistent with Zimbabwe's treaty obligations.
A second case concerned a Zimbabwean human rights NGO, which painstakingly assembled over 40 litigants who had succeeded in obtaining final judgments for damages from Zimbabwean courts, but whose judgments were simply ignored by the Government of Zimbabwe. The claims arose from assaults and even torture by members of the security forces of Zimbabwe.
The government sought to justify its failure to honour the judgments by invoking before the Tribunal the contention that it lacked the means. The Tribunal would have no truck with this. It granted an order holding the Government of Zimbabwe in this respect too to be in breach of its obligations under the Treaty to provide access to justice for its citizens. The Tribunal has ordered the Government not only to honour its own judgments; it has set in place a mechanism to have the awards revalorised so as to address the delay and the ravages of inflation.
It is the third instance you would have heard most about. It concerned first one, then ultimately 78, commercial farmers. They were Zimbabwean citizens, nearly all having obtained their farms on the open market after independence in 1980, many of them doing so on "certificates of no interest" by the Zimbabwean government. But in 2005 Amendment 17 to the Constitution of Zimbabwe was adopted.
It effected a radical change to the property clause in the Bill of Rights, authorising the government of Zimbabwe by ministerial decree to gazette such land as it wished to pass by that simple act from the private owner to the State for further distribution as it wished. It contained an ouster clause: any challenge to the provision, or any act of execution under it, was ousted from adjudication by any court.
The case takes its name from the lead farmer, Michael Campbell.[10] Halfway through the rather drawn out proceedings, he and his wife - both in their late 70s - and his son-in-law were abducted from their farm. They were beaten to such an extent that the son-in-law nearly lost his eye while Michael Campbell himself sustained head injuries from which he has not fully recovered.
Into the mouth of his wife was placed a burning ember and she was required to sign a waiver of the claim then proceeding before the Tribunal. Whether she did so is uncertain, because at some stage of her beatings she lapsed into unconsciousness.
Their reaction was to proceed with the case. We appeared again before the Tribunal, they in wheelchairs and with their heads bandaged, and reached the merit stage of the argument. The government of Zimbabwe's legal team, which had procured a number of postponements, tried for one more.
The next senior judge, Dr Alberto Luis Mondlane - scion of a famous Mozambican revolutionary family - said, very quietly, in response: "We are trying to build a house of justice in this region". The Tribunal (presided over by the Chief Justice of Mauritius) directed that the case continue. The Zimbabwean High Commissioner in Windhoek ordered the legal team to withdraw. We sat in silence as they did, and completed the argument.
A month or two later the Tribunal delivered an award which I would invite you to read on the SADC Tribunal's website.[11] It sustained the attack on the land seizure measures on all three bases argued. It held that the measures were arbitrary and affronted the rule of law, in the purported ouster of access to the courts.
It held secondly that the measures were arbitrary in providing for a mere seizure, with no justiciable measure of compensation at all. And thirdly, it held that the measures constituted discrimination in conflict with the requirements of the Treaty. This was because, although the race of those affected was never mentioned, the seizure was only from people who happened to be white (and not because they were absentee or bad farmers, or because their land holdings were by some measure or the other excessive), and concomitantly that the measures benefitted only a class of political chefs, as they are known in Central Africa: the well-connected, the Wabenzi as East Africans express it in Swahili. And so it happened that a courtroom with predominantly White farmers who had told me that they had learnt not to expect justice in Africa, found it at the dispassionate and adept hands of a team of senior black judges.[12]
The government of Zimbabwe at first ignored the Tribunal's award. Then successively the Minister of Justice and President attacked it. They were followed, unusually, by the Deputy Chief Justice of Zimbabwe, who took the occasion of the official opening of the courts in 2009 to deny the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. I should note that every member of Zimbabwe's Supreme Court, bar one, has accepted at least one confiscated farm from the Government - and continues to sit in land cases.
Now the Protocol on the Tribunal provides for the registration of its awards by domestic courts, so as to make them executable under local law. We proceeded with such an application. The allocated High Court judge happened to be a former Attorney-General and thus (in Zimbabwe) member of Cabinet. He disallowed the application for our ad hoc recognition as counsel for the purposes of the case - although such applications in my instance had been granted a dozen times before.
Suspecting that this might happen, we had able Zimbabwean counsel ready and briefed, who thereupon delivered the argument which had been prepared. Interestingly, Patel J rejected the contention by the Zimbabwean government that no jurisdiction of the Tribunal over it existed. But less surprisingly he dismissed the application for registration.
He contrived to do so on the grounds that to do so would be "contrary to public policy" - because it would contradict what the domestic law and courts had authorised.[13] That, of course, is Kafkaesque: the whole point of going to the international Tribunal was that the laws and court orders of the country had authorised that which was in conflict with Zimbabwe's international law obligation.
We pressed on. To the consternation of the Government of Zimbabwe we applied for registration in Pretoria. Again, the Government resorted to withdrawal. But we said that was too late, because it had entered opposition and by that act, consented to jurisdiction.
In any event, we showed that jurisdiction existed to obtain such an order against a member State of SADC in South Africa. We proceeded to attach Zimbabwean government property in South Africa. Regrettably, the one executable asset for which we had hoped, an aircraft registered in the name of the Government of Zimbabwe and pressed into service for the indispensable objective of a state visit to the Jimmy Choo shop in Sandton, has not yet eventuated.
What has now happened is that the government of Zimbabwe has resorted, not unexpectedly, to extra-legal means. It did so on 17 August 2010 by enlisting the support of other SADC members for an effective suspension of the Tribunal while various spurious questions concerning its jurisdiction and the extent of its powers are being investigated. The terms of office of the first appointed judges are being allowed to expire. In more ways than one, the lights have been turned off.
Of all this there has been far too little scrutiny, let alone the protest to which I believe proper scrutiny should give rise. It is patently, I believe, in violation of the Treaty and Protocol.
I turn from issues concerning the courts and what I have suggested has been a shared silence, to one in respect of which far more might be expected from the organised legal profession. You will find on the Law Society's website the text of a Legal Practice Bill presented to Cabinet on the morning of 5 May 2010, approved by it and announced by the Minister of Justice as being tabled in Parliament that afternoon.
It provides for the disestablishment of all law societies and bars, and the compulsory vesting of their assets in and transfer of their staff to a statutory national council. Its members will be appointed in the discretion of the Minister. I invite you to read the Bill, and to watch the course of events in the next few months.
Consider that there is no constitutional democracy without independent courts, and independent courts cannot be staffed and cannot themselves function unless there is an independent legal profession. I have spoken and written about this elsewhere; if it interests you, you will find it on the Siberink website.[14] It is an area which does not only concern the practitioners, or the judges, but those of you who see part of your own freedom in teaching law derived from the free and independent legal system in which you need to function.
A last area of silence is the one which binds us all together. It is the proper relationship, and respective responsibilities, as between the judiciary, the organised profession and you, the teachers of law. It is of course legal education. We cannot look to the law teachers, practitioners and judges of the future unless their education prepares them for it. And in this regard, I have to cross swords with the director of legal education in the Law Society of South Africa, Nick Swart, for whom I have great respect.
Writing in the Mail & Guardian of 23 December 2010 to 6 January 2011, he commented on the research findings on the LLB curriculum by the Council on Higher Education. Quite rightly he conveyed the concern "that a substantial number of our law graduates lack essential skills such as research, computer work, literacy and numeracy". He says further that these graduates "place a great burden on the attorneys' profession, which must provide training in these skills, which takes up the time and funding that could have been used to strengthen the legal transactional skills required in the attorneys' profession".
He raises the need for a core curriculum, comments on the disparity between faculties, and asserts that, while the attorneys' profession "respects the fact that law faculties are training their students for other vocations too", since attorneys are the largest group of lawyers dealing with the public "the requirements of the attorneys' profession must be high on the lists of their priorities". The point of his piece is ultimately that "the profession cannot devote more time to basic and remedial training to law graduates. They need to be trained also in legal practice skills. We will continue to engage law faculties and CHE on this issue.
I speak of course as a person with very limited experience in teaching law, and most of that about 30 years ago. But I have followed legal education with close interest. I served with Nick and others on liaison bodies, including one for the creation of a judicial education institute - 17 years after our democratic transition still not in existence. I do think that he is right in many of his judgments. But I do believe, strongly, that the predicament of those who train young legal practitioners as regards their educational deficiencies is not to be addressed by expecting universities to remedy basic educational deficiencies.
The deficiencies to which Nick Swart refers, which haunt and cripple young practitioners, are the responsibility not of tertiary institutions but of basic education in this country. The function of universities is the induction of the intellectually qualified in the rigors of rational discourse. It is not to remedy the deficiencies of primary and then secondary education. It also is the duty of the organised legal profession, not universities, to teach professional skills and the adjectival law relevant to these.
I thus do not believe, as Nick propounds, either that universities should teach professional ethics and related subjects, or that their function is to be remedial educationalists.
I sense that the reality is that given two shadows - the long shadow of discriminatory education, and that of the failure since 1994 to have succeeded in remedying it - all of us to a degree must deal with reality and the less than perfect. That this will entail some degree of doing what we would not ideally wish to do, is inherent. But we need to be clear what in principle our respective responsibilities are.
As one who is not a teacher of law, but who cares deeply that teachers of law should be free to teach law, I would ask you not to fall victim to mere pressure and political correctness in your curriculum-setting. I believe you unfortunately did so once before, when you agreed to the introduction of the four-year LLB. I know of no law firm, other legal employer or Bar in the country which considers that to have been a wise step.
Social pressures and good faith gave rise to the decision, but in my view it should not now be repeated. Your calling is clear: more than intubating students with a stock of knowledge, you teach principled and reasoned thinking, and a sense that the intellect and human spirit each only flourish in conditions of freedom. And you teach, or need to teach, discourse: that we all need, in our writing and our speaking to convey things simply, but not more simply than they are.
It was a very great Afrikaans poet who, to the fury of Dr Verwoerd wrote the play, Die Pluimsaad Waai Ver, which premiered more than forty years ago in the theatre where I address you now. He said that dissent is just as essential in a nation as adherence; that it is not dangerous that dissent fails; what is dangerous, he said, is that a whole generation passes without protest.[15]
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[1] 2009 Law Quarterly Review 440 at 442-3.
[2] Minister of Health v New Clicks South Africa (Pty) Limited 2006 (2) SA 311 (CC).
[3] Sidumo v Rustenburg Platinum Mines 2008 (2) SA 24 (CC).
[4] (1997) 114 SALJ 656.
[5] Bingham The Rule of Law (Allen Lane, 2010).
[6] 2008 (5) SA 449 (SCA) at para 21.
[7] Lewis op cit 465.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Chief Lesapo v North West Agricultural Bank 2000 (1) SA 409 (CC).
[10] An award-winning Channel 4 documentary, Mugabe and the White African, has been made about the Campbell family and the SADC litigation.
[11] http://sadc-tribunal.org/. See too http://www.chr.up.ac.za/index.php/documents/african-human-rights-case-law-database.html.
[12] The panel comprised Justices Pillay (Mauritius), Mtambo (Zambia), Mondlane (Mozambique), Kambovo (Angola) and Tshosa (Botswana).
[13] Gramara (Private) Limited and Colin Bailie Cloete v Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe and Attorney-General of Zimbabwe Case No HC33/2009 (heard on 24 November 2009).
[14] www.siberink.co.za.
[15] JC Steyn NP van Wyk Louw vol 2 p 879, quoting Van Wyk Louw's Lojale Verset (my translation).
Source: Politicsweb
Thank you for the honour this invitation constitutes. It stirred many feelings in me. The first was doubt as to how your Society took that decision. I say this because I know the way my own profession takes decisions. This is best exemplified by the decision of the Johannesburg Bar Council some 40 years ago.
A well-regarded but cantankerous judge was hospitalised. A delegation was despatched by the Bar Council to his hospital bedside. The leader cleared his throat and told the judge that the Johannesburg Bar Council had mandated him to convey two messages. The first was that he was asked to wish the judge on behalf of the Johannesburg Bar a speedy recovery. The second was to tell the judge that this was on a vote of six to five.
My second feeling was one of nostalgia: nostalgia for those who taught me here, and who either as teachers or as fellow students became my friends for life; and those who taught me, or with whom I worked, in my own postgraduate life. Allow me to mention JC de Wet, Willem Joubert and Tony Honoré - now in his 62nd year of teaching at Oxford.
I and many of my colleagues in practice owe an inexpressible debt to you and to your predecessors. It concerns me that often law teachers seem to doubt the worth of what they do. Their task is ancient and vital. As CP Snow writes of Cambridge in his elegaic novel about university ambition, The Masters, it "[i]s hard not to think of other men walking as we did, of the chain of lives going back so long a time, of others walking those same narrow streets in the rain".
That is not to say that law teachers at times lack brutality. I remember Sir Rupert Cross, great writer and teacher on the law of evidence, handing back collections (essays) at Oxford and saying: "I know you can't help your laziness, but you should really try to do something about your stupidity".
When you invite a practitioner to speak, you should know that his own scholarship will not have been sustained by the bits of writing and lecturing which only earlier years at the Bar readily allowed. So I do not venture a scholarly theme.
On the other hand, if you expect me to speak about things that matter to the profession, I shall do so, but only in part. For what I want to talk about today is a common malaise: a lack of critical faculty not merely in the Faculty, but across the face of legal life in South Africa. My thesis is that, for all lawyers, there are disturbing developments about which we are insufficiently articulate and active.
I have often thought that the trouble with political revolution, velvet or otherwise, is that it gives rise to the same illusions as university graduation. There is the sense of attainment and finality, of a status achieved and no more to be learnt or done. I believe the converse is true. It is just a beginning. That is true of the commencement of constitutionalism in 1994.
Let me illustrate my point with scattered examples from three different areas of our shared complacency. The first concerns adjudication. The second concerns legal practice. And the third concerns you, law teachers, what you do in legal education and what we, the legal profession, do or should ourselves do in legal education.
Time does not permit today to speak in detail of the many challenges with which I believe courts in Southern Africa are confronted. I would however like to say two things in this respect. The first is that it is time to end an approach which is insufficiently rigorous in its scrutiny of the judgments of courts, and how they function.
I do not mean by this that there should be anything less than professional respect for judges, and least of all that there should be the kind of attacks on courts, chiefly by political figures, which from time to time have been manifested.
But other than the writing of David Dyzenhaus, Stu Woolman and Jonathan Lewis, in the tradition of John Dugard, Tony Mathews and Barend van Niekerk, and later Fink Haysom, Clive Plasket and Etienne Mureinik, what probing critique has there been in the last five years of the work of the Constitutional Court?
Those of you who are public lawyers may not agree with it all. You may or may not agree with Jonathan Lewis when he describes the output of the Constitution Court in recent years as "evidenced by an atavistic sentimentality", "outcome-based" and "mock-Solomonic".[1] But then we would all benefit if you said so.
Do you have nothing to say when the Constitutional Court, in the New Clicks case,[2] produced 446 pages of judgments (deciding the matter, like the Johannesburg Bar Council, "by six to five").
Why have you not criticised the refusal by Justice Sachs in the Sidumo case[3] to join Justice Ngcobo and others in determining whether the right in issue was a labour right or an administrative justice right, he urging a "move away from unduly rigid compartmentalisation so as to allow judicial reasoning to embrace fluid concepts of hybridity and permeability"? Do you share my inability to understand language like that, and the concern that it is inexact because the reasoning is not rigorous?
This is not a matter of words, although as lawyers we know that there can scarcely be expressed thought without them. As Lord Hoffmann has written,[4] our legal lives are, as TS Eliot suggested, essentially an "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings".
No, what we are concerned with is the lack of legal clarity. And as Lord Bingham has recently written in his wonderful book on the rule of law,[5] which I commend to all of you, one of the first requisites for the rule of law is clarity in the law.
The consequence, we have seen too often in recent years, has been decisions in which one battles to find a ratio, when there is a self-indulgent multiplicity of voices, and when, as Nugent JA stated in Makambi v Member of Executive Council,[6] various Constitutional Court decisions on the same issue require the courts to go "in diametrically opposed directions".
Beyond this, there are other institutional issues relating to the courts. One is the gross disparity in funding. The Constitutional Court draws on R8 million in funding for its library. The Supreme Court of Appeal, having to cover all fields in the law, submitted a budget for R1,2 million this year. It has received just R100 000. That includes acquisitions for the chambers of the 22 judges. Obviously no text books can be bought, or subscriptions to law journals sustained.
The Johannesburg High Court is in a similar crisis. Yet in recent months we found R71 million to subvent a gathering of world youth on the not-new topic of imperialism. It was Heine who said (with deadly prescience) that the nation that begins by burning books ends by burning people. Perhaps we can say that the nation that begins by disparaging legal scholarship risks renouncing law itself.
Another continuing concern is how we choose our judges. It is probably unnecessary for me in this regard to disclose the interest I have: that in the past my own nominations both to the Constitutional Court and to the High Court have, to the undisguised relief of my creditors, been rejected. I do not speak with rancour on the matter, but equally I cannot avoid speaking. There are matters we need to consider.
I would hope that all of us are committed to the fundamental transformation of our legal system. By that I mean the betterment of the system, in all its attributes, so that it is both closely congruent with and an effective vehicle for the new constitutional dispensation introduced in 1993.
I stress "betterment", because as Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia has reminded us, transformation does not just mean change, it means change for the better. Other than the Bar, who contributes to researching candidacies for the Bench? Should your Society not have a review committee to do just that, to offer an objective assessment of their academic worth, judgments or other legal writing, and to offer informed criticism of candidates to the JSC?
Countries differ widely, and I accept readily that we have imperatives of our own. I am not a believer that addressing the makeup of the Bench could await the slow evolution of passing years. But that does not prevent us from asking questions regarding the contrast for example between the House of Lords where the 12 Lords of Appeal in Ordinary on the last figures I saw[7] had on average 14 years of judicial experience before being appointed to that court; in Canada, 12 years; while in South Africa, fully six of the 11 members of the Constitutional Court had no judicial experience before joining the court with the remaining five averaging four years judicial experience each.
Can it be said that certain of last year's appointments reflect a continuing disregard for discernible judicial excellence?
Another concern is the output of our top court. In 2008, the Constitutional Court heard 22 cases. The Supreme Court of Canada heard 82, the House of Lords 102 appeals in 2005 and 94 in 2006. In each of 2006 and 2007 one member of the Constitutional Court wrote only two judgments, another produced only three in each of 2005, 2006 and 2007.[8]
The reason why these questions are important is that, as you know, it seems set that the Constitutional Court is to become the apex court in South Africa, for all matters. I have never understood how 11 judges, sitting en banc, could perform this task physically. Eleven may be the optimal number for Man United, but it is not for a court. And if they cease to sit en banc, one faces the prospect of inconsistent precedents, already a serious concern in the Supreme Court of Appeal in recent years as its numbers has grown. Nor do I understand the rationale.
A very deliberate policy choice was made in 1993 not to have complete integration of the courts, placing the Constitutional Court at the top but exclusively concerned with constitutional law. Some of us at the time believed, and wrote, that this was a wrong turn, and that we should have followed the examples of Botswana, Canada, India, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, to quote just a few ready examples.
We needed, we said (and the late Chief Justice Corbett was one), to recognise the fact that the law is indivisible. But the turn was taken in the road, and consequences follow. These include the selection of judges over the past 17 years on the basis that they would only adjudicate constitutional matters, and therefore their lack of involvement in prior professional life in wide areas of private law until now mattered less than it otherwise might. Now all must change for the highest court - except those selected on the contrary premise.
The full debate in this regard is a considerable one, and we cannot have it today. But I use it to illustrate an area of deafening silence, where one sees and hears very little, in the legal profession, in the ranks of the judiciary (although obvious constraints apply there) and above all, amongst those of you who write and teach in the field.
There is a yet worse silence regarding adjudication. This is far more concrete than the institutional issues I have just raised regarding South African courts. It concerns the suspension of a vital institution created in international law by solemn treaty obligation between the members of the South African Development Community (SADC).
The Treaty itself contemplates the creation of a regional Tribunal, its role being to adjudicate disputes rooted in international law arising in the region. The Treaty itself makes important provision for international human rights and the rule of law. It was to be expected that at some stage a dispute would arise, and so it did.
Let me give you three examples of the kind of work the Tribunal has done in the short period of three years that it has effectively been functioning.
The first concerns a man called Luke Tembani, the first black Zimbabwean (if one must use the description) ever to obtain freehold title to agricultural land in that country. He did that in 1980. He built up a considerable and successful farming enterprise, employing many, and with enough of a sense of community as to build a school on his farm providing education for over 300 children in the district. He borrowed some money from Zimbabwe's Land Bank.
He was troubled, but not unduly so, when the onset of hyperinflation from 2000 saw monthly statements in which the interest on his debt achieved absurd proportions. Shortly the interest exceeded the (considerable) market capital value of his thriving farm. He tried to negotiate, but the Land Bank's calculator was inexorable. (Behind the calculator, it seems, there was a roving eye which had fallen on his farm.)
What was invoked against him was a statutory provision very similar to the one which was struck down in this country in the Chief Lesapo case[9] in the Constitutional Court. The offensive provision was that an entity like the Land Bank would be permitted to adjudicate in its back rooms an amount said to be owing, and have this certified as a judgment debt.
Under such measures, the courts are completely bypassed. Invoking the right to access to courts protected under the SADC Treaty, and quoting the very useful Constitutional Court decision in Chief Lesapo, we succeeded in obtaining an order from the Tribunal that that provision was inconsistent with Zimbabwe's treaty obligations.
A second case concerned a Zimbabwean human rights NGO, which painstakingly assembled over 40 litigants who had succeeded in obtaining final judgments for damages from Zimbabwean courts, but whose judgments were simply ignored by the Government of Zimbabwe. The claims arose from assaults and even torture by members of the security forces of Zimbabwe.
The government sought to justify its failure to honour the judgments by invoking before the Tribunal the contention that it lacked the means. The Tribunal would have no truck with this. It granted an order holding the Government of Zimbabwe in this respect too to be in breach of its obligations under the Treaty to provide access to justice for its citizens. The Tribunal has ordered the Government not only to honour its own judgments; it has set in place a mechanism to have the awards revalorised so as to address the delay and the ravages of inflation.
It is the third instance you would have heard most about. It concerned first one, then ultimately 78, commercial farmers. They were Zimbabwean citizens, nearly all having obtained their farms on the open market after independence in 1980, many of them doing so on "certificates of no interest" by the Zimbabwean government. But in 2005 Amendment 17 to the Constitution of Zimbabwe was adopted.
It effected a radical change to the property clause in the Bill of Rights, authorising the government of Zimbabwe by ministerial decree to gazette such land as it wished to pass by that simple act from the private owner to the State for further distribution as it wished. It contained an ouster clause: any challenge to the provision, or any act of execution under it, was ousted from adjudication by any court.
The case takes its name from the lead farmer, Michael Campbell.[10] Halfway through the rather drawn out proceedings, he and his wife - both in their late 70s - and his son-in-law were abducted from their farm. They were beaten to such an extent that the son-in-law nearly lost his eye while Michael Campbell himself sustained head injuries from which he has not fully recovered.
Into the mouth of his wife was placed a burning ember and she was required to sign a waiver of the claim then proceeding before the Tribunal. Whether she did so is uncertain, because at some stage of her beatings she lapsed into unconsciousness.
Their reaction was to proceed with the case. We appeared again before the Tribunal, they in wheelchairs and with their heads bandaged, and reached the merit stage of the argument. The government of Zimbabwe's legal team, which had procured a number of postponements, tried for one more.
The next senior judge, Dr Alberto Luis Mondlane - scion of a famous Mozambican revolutionary family - said, very quietly, in response: "We are trying to build a house of justice in this region". The Tribunal (presided over by the Chief Justice of Mauritius) directed that the case continue. The Zimbabwean High Commissioner in Windhoek ordered the legal team to withdraw. We sat in silence as they did, and completed the argument.
A month or two later the Tribunal delivered an award which I would invite you to read on the SADC Tribunal's website.[11] It sustained the attack on the land seizure measures on all three bases argued. It held that the measures were arbitrary and affronted the rule of law, in the purported ouster of access to the courts.
It held secondly that the measures were arbitrary in providing for a mere seizure, with no justiciable measure of compensation at all. And thirdly, it held that the measures constituted discrimination in conflict with the requirements of the Treaty. This was because, although the race of those affected was never mentioned, the seizure was only from people who happened to be white (and not because they were absentee or bad farmers, or because their land holdings were by some measure or the other excessive), and concomitantly that the measures benefitted only a class of political chefs, as they are known in Central Africa: the well-connected, the Wabenzi as East Africans express it in Swahili. And so it happened that a courtroom with predominantly White farmers who had told me that they had learnt not to expect justice in Africa, found it at the dispassionate and adept hands of a team of senior black judges.[12]
The government of Zimbabwe at first ignored the Tribunal's award. Then successively the Minister of Justice and President attacked it. They were followed, unusually, by the Deputy Chief Justice of Zimbabwe, who took the occasion of the official opening of the courts in 2009 to deny the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. I should note that every member of Zimbabwe's Supreme Court, bar one, has accepted at least one confiscated farm from the Government - and continues to sit in land cases.
Now the Protocol on the Tribunal provides for the registration of its awards by domestic courts, so as to make them executable under local law. We proceeded with such an application. The allocated High Court judge happened to be a former Attorney-General and thus (in Zimbabwe) member of Cabinet. He disallowed the application for our ad hoc recognition as counsel for the purposes of the case - although such applications in my instance had been granted a dozen times before.
Suspecting that this might happen, we had able Zimbabwean counsel ready and briefed, who thereupon delivered the argument which had been prepared. Interestingly, Patel J rejected the contention by the Zimbabwean government that no jurisdiction of the Tribunal over it existed. But less surprisingly he dismissed the application for registration.
He contrived to do so on the grounds that to do so would be "contrary to public policy" - because it would contradict what the domestic law and courts had authorised.[13] That, of course, is Kafkaesque: the whole point of going to the international Tribunal was that the laws and court orders of the country had authorised that which was in conflict with Zimbabwe's international law obligation.
We pressed on. To the consternation of the Government of Zimbabwe we applied for registration in Pretoria. Again, the Government resorted to withdrawal. But we said that was too late, because it had entered opposition and by that act, consented to jurisdiction.
In any event, we showed that jurisdiction existed to obtain such an order against a member State of SADC in South Africa. We proceeded to attach Zimbabwean government property in South Africa. Regrettably, the one executable asset for which we had hoped, an aircraft registered in the name of the Government of Zimbabwe and pressed into service for the indispensable objective of a state visit to the Jimmy Choo shop in Sandton, has not yet eventuated.
What has now happened is that the government of Zimbabwe has resorted, not unexpectedly, to extra-legal means. It did so on 17 August 2010 by enlisting the support of other SADC members for an effective suspension of the Tribunal while various spurious questions concerning its jurisdiction and the extent of its powers are being investigated. The terms of office of the first appointed judges are being allowed to expire. In more ways than one, the lights have been turned off.
Of all this there has been far too little scrutiny, let alone the protest to which I believe proper scrutiny should give rise. It is patently, I believe, in violation of the Treaty and Protocol.
I turn from issues concerning the courts and what I have suggested has been a shared silence, to one in respect of which far more might be expected from the organised legal profession. You will find on the Law Society's website the text of a Legal Practice Bill presented to Cabinet on the morning of 5 May 2010, approved by it and announced by the Minister of Justice as being tabled in Parliament that afternoon.
It provides for the disestablishment of all law societies and bars, and the compulsory vesting of their assets in and transfer of their staff to a statutory national council. Its members will be appointed in the discretion of the Minister. I invite you to read the Bill, and to watch the course of events in the next few months.
Consider that there is no constitutional democracy without independent courts, and independent courts cannot be staffed and cannot themselves function unless there is an independent legal profession. I have spoken and written about this elsewhere; if it interests you, you will find it on the Siberink website.[14] It is an area which does not only concern the practitioners, or the judges, but those of you who see part of your own freedom in teaching law derived from the free and independent legal system in which you need to function.
A last area of silence is the one which binds us all together. It is the proper relationship, and respective responsibilities, as between the judiciary, the organised profession and you, the teachers of law. It is of course legal education. We cannot look to the law teachers, practitioners and judges of the future unless their education prepares them for it. And in this regard, I have to cross swords with the director of legal education in the Law Society of South Africa, Nick Swart, for whom I have great respect.
Writing in the Mail & Guardian of 23 December 2010 to 6 January 2011, he commented on the research findings on the LLB curriculum by the Council on Higher Education. Quite rightly he conveyed the concern "that a substantial number of our law graduates lack essential skills such as research, computer work, literacy and numeracy". He says further that these graduates "place a great burden on the attorneys' profession, which must provide training in these skills, which takes up the time and funding that could have been used to strengthen the legal transactional skills required in the attorneys' profession".
He raises the need for a core curriculum, comments on the disparity between faculties, and asserts that, while the attorneys' profession "respects the fact that law faculties are training their students for other vocations too", since attorneys are the largest group of lawyers dealing with the public "the requirements of the attorneys' profession must be high on the lists of their priorities". The point of his piece is ultimately that "the profession cannot devote more time to basic and remedial training to law graduates. They need to be trained also in legal practice skills. We will continue to engage law faculties and CHE on this issue.
I speak of course as a person with very limited experience in teaching law, and most of that about 30 years ago. But I have followed legal education with close interest. I served with Nick and others on liaison bodies, including one for the creation of a judicial education institute - 17 years after our democratic transition still not in existence. I do think that he is right in many of his judgments. But I do believe, strongly, that the predicament of those who train young legal practitioners as regards their educational deficiencies is not to be addressed by expecting universities to remedy basic educational deficiencies.
The deficiencies to which Nick Swart refers, which haunt and cripple young practitioners, are the responsibility not of tertiary institutions but of basic education in this country. The function of universities is the induction of the intellectually qualified in the rigors of rational discourse. It is not to remedy the deficiencies of primary and then secondary education. It also is the duty of the organised legal profession, not universities, to teach professional skills and the adjectival law relevant to these.
I thus do not believe, as Nick propounds, either that universities should teach professional ethics and related subjects, or that their function is to be remedial educationalists.
I sense that the reality is that given two shadows - the long shadow of discriminatory education, and that of the failure since 1994 to have succeeded in remedying it - all of us to a degree must deal with reality and the less than perfect. That this will entail some degree of doing what we would not ideally wish to do, is inherent. But we need to be clear what in principle our respective responsibilities are.
As one who is not a teacher of law, but who cares deeply that teachers of law should be free to teach law, I would ask you not to fall victim to mere pressure and political correctness in your curriculum-setting. I believe you unfortunately did so once before, when you agreed to the introduction of the four-year LLB. I know of no law firm, other legal employer or Bar in the country which considers that to have been a wise step.
Social pressures and good faith gave rise to the decision, but in my view it should not now be repeated. Your calling is clear: more than intubating students with a stock of knowledge, you teach principled and reasoned thinking, and a sense that the intellect and human spirit each only flourish in conditions of freedom. And you teach, or need to teach, discourse: that we all need, in our writing and our speaking to convey things simply, but not more simply than they are.
It was a very great Afrikaans poet who, to the fury of Dr Verwoerd wrote the play, Die Pluimsaad Waai Ver, which premiered more than forty years ago in the theatre where I address you now. He said that dissent is just as essential in a nation as adherence; that it is not dangerous that dissent fails; what is dangerous, he said, is that a whole generation passes without protest.[15]
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[1] 2009 Law Quarterly Review 440 at 442-3.
[2] Minister of Health v New Clicks South Africa (Pty) Limited 2006 (2) SA 311 (CC).
[3] Sidumo v Rustenburg Platinum Mines 2008 (2) SA 24 (CC).
[4] (1997) 114 SALJ 656.
[5] Bingham The Rule of Law (Allen Lane, 2010).
[6] 2008 (5) SA 449 (SCA) at para 21.
[7] Lewis op cit 465.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Chief Lesapo v North West Agricultural Bank 2000 (1) SA 409 (CC).
[10] An award-winning Channel 4 documentary, Mugabe and the White African, has been made about the Campbell family and the SADC litigation.
[11] http://sadc-tribunal.org/. See too http://www.chr.up.ac.za/index.php/documents/african-human-rights-case-law-database.html.
[12] The panel comprised Justices Pillay (Mauritius), Mtambo (Zambia), Mondlane (Mozambique), Kambovo (Angola) and Tshosa (Botswana).
[13] Gramara (Private) Limited and Colin Bailie Cloete v Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe and Attorney-General of Zimbabwe Case No HC33/2009 (heard on 24 November 2009).
[14] www.siberink.co.za.
[15] JC Steyn NP van Wyk Louw vol 2 p 879, quoting Van Wyk Louw's Lojale Verset (my translation).
Source: Politicsweb
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Whistleblower finally takes stand
The “reluctant” witness who refused to leave his cell at Mabopane’s Odi Prison to resume his testimony regarding the 2004 foiled C-Max prison escape, yesterday willingly took the witness stand in the Pretoria High Court. King Winner Maluleka, who blew the whistle six years ago on the activities of inmates who planned the daring escape bid, kept the court waiting for two days, as he refused to come to court.
Judge Joseph Raulinga on Tuesday told prison officials to use all means available and their experience to try to persuade Maluleka to come to court. It was not the first time that Maluleka had refused to give his co-operation.
In 2009 he insisted to speak to the Minister of Correctional Services, claiming he was being victimised in prison after he blew the whistle. Judge Raulinga at the time called on the prison head to try to address Maluleka’s problems. After an exchange of pleasantries yesterday between the judge and Maluleka, wishing each other the best for the new year, Maluleka once again complained that his conditions had not changed. He nevertheless said he was willing to co-operate. The judge noted that the court had already wasted two days because Maluleka would not come to court and told him his problems in jail and the trial were two separate issues.
Maluleka, called back by the defence to be grilled about a statement he had made to a Correctional Services captain pertaining to the alleged escape bid by five inmates in August 2004, said he saw no reason why he should be called back. He, however, now agreed to testify further.
He earlier told the court he had overheard a conversation between former prison warder Herman Makhubela and an inmate. Makhubela had told the inmate that he wanted to leave the services of the department, but needed a minibus to generate an income. The inmate, Maluleka testified, said Makhubela would receive the minibus if he smuggled a firearm into prison and gave it to him. Maluleka said he reported this to his section head, but nothing was done about it. During the escape bid, he heard shots being fired and one inmate telling another to “shoot the dog” - a reference to acting area co-ordinator Ben Ndinisa. Both Ndinisa and prison head Thomas Gomba were shot dead that day, while two of the inmates committed suicide when they realised their jailbreak failed.
Two other inmates who pleaded guilty to the charges were jailed for 12 and 20 years for their part in the events. Makhubela and inmate Patric Mabusa are now facing 16 charges, including two of murder. Their trial was separated from the others as they had pleaded not guilty.
Source: IoL
Judge Joseph Raulinga on Tuesday told prison officials to use all means available and their experience to try to persuade Maluleka to come to court. It was not the first time that Maluleka had refused to give his co-operation.
In 2009 he insisted to speak to the Minister of Correctional Services, claiming he was being victimised in prison after he blew the whistle. Judge Raulinga at the time called on the prison head to try to address Maluleka’s problems. After an exchange of pleasantries yesterday between the judge and Maluleka, wishing each other the best for the new year, Maluleka once again complained that his conditions had not changed. He nevertheless said he was willing to co-operate. The judge noted that the court had already wasted two days because Maluleka would not come to court and told him his problems in jail and the trial were two separate issues.
Maluleka, called back by the defence to be grilled about a statement he had made to a Correctional Services captain pertaining to the alleged escape bid by five inmates in August 2004, said he saw no reason why he should be called back. He, however, now agreed to testify further.
He earlier told the court he had overheard a conversation between former prison warder Herman Makhubela and an inmate. Makhubela had told the inmate that he wanted to leave the services of the department, but needed a minibus to generate an income. The inmate, Maluleka testified, said Makhubela would receive the minibus if he smuggled a firearm into prison and gave it to him. Maluleka said he reported this to his section head, but nothing was done about it. During the escape bid, he heard shots being fired and one inmate telling another to “shoot the dog” - a reference to acting area co-ordinator Ben Ndinisa. Both Ndinisa and prison head Thomas Gomba were shot dead that day, while two of the inmates committed suicide when they realised their jailbreak failed.
Two other inmates who pleaded guilty to the charges were jailed for 12 and 20 years for their part in the events. Makhubela and inmate Patric Mabusa are now facing 16 charges, including two of murder. Their trial was separated from the others as they had pleaded not guilty.
Source: IoL
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Southern Sudan Makes Peace Deal
Southern Sudan signed a cease-fire on Wednesday with a renegade general four days before the oil-rich region votes in an independence referendum likely to create the world’s newest country. Fears of internal fighting have plagued the area despite excitement among southerners that independence could bring them peace after decades of conflict.
Lt. Gen. George Athor defected from the southern army last year to run for governor in Jonglei State, the largest and most volatile of the south’s 10 states. After losing the vote in April, General Athor revolted against the southern government. The revolt represented a significant security threat as the country prepared for Sunday’s weeklong referendum.
Southern Sudan’s vice president, Riek Machar, presided over the signing of the cease-fire in Juba, the south’s capital. The deal included terms for the reintegration of General Athor’s dissident forces in the southern army. Abraham Thon, the head of General Athor’s delegation, said the deal was “the end to all the troubles of the people of southern Sudan.”
David Gressly, head of the United Nations mission in Southern Sudan, said the agreement was “one more reflection of the many steps that have been taken since 2005,” when a north-south peace deal was signed, ending more than two decades of war.
Source: New York Times
Lt. Gen. George Athor defected from the southern army last year to run for governor in Jonglei State, the largest and most volatile of the south’s 10 states. After losing the vote in April, General Athor revolted against the southern government. The revolt represented a significant security threat as the country prepared for Sunday’s weeklong referendum.
Southern Sudan’s vice president, Riek Machar, presided over the signing of the cease-fire in Juba, the south’s capital. The deal included terms for the reintegration of General Athor’s dissident forces in the southern army. Abraham Thon, the head of General Athor’s delegation, said the deal was “the end to all the troubles of the people of southern Sudan.”
David Gressly, head of the United Nations mission in Southern Sudan, said the agreement was “one more reflection of the many steps that have been taken since 2005,” when a north-south peace deal was signed, ending more than two decades of war.
Source: New York Times
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Killing sparks countrywide protests
Dozens of supporters of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) took to streets countrywide, burning tyres and blocking traffic in protest over the martyrdom of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer, a private TV channel reported on Tuesday.
According to details, protests broke out in Lahore, where PPP workers chanted slogans in support of the party, burned tyres and blocked traffic on The Mall, witnesses said. Shops were closed in most parts of the city, where people descended on Taseer’s residence to mourn his death. At least three people were injured in firing incidents in Badami Bagh area of Lahore. All cinemas and theatres were also abruptly closed after the assassination. Markets and shops were shut down at The Mall soon after his assassination, the channel reported.
Qaumi Tajir Ittehad (QTI) Chairman Safdar Ali Butt said the killing of the governor was highly condemnable. He said the Punjab governor was a true Muslim and lover of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He said that it was the murder of the freedom of expression in the country, adding that it was a cruel act perpetrated by terrorists who wanted to destabilise the country and its economy.
Police have been put on red alert in Gujranwala to avert any untoward incident. Enraged protestors raised anti-Punjab government slogans and demanded a proper inquiry into the incident. GT Road also remained closed for several hours. In Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Muridke, Sheikhupura, Sialkot and in other big cities of the country protesters torched tyres and raised slogans over the incident, the channel said.
An air of panic permeated in other provinces as soon as the news regarding the assassination of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer broke out. Reports of violent protests poured in from various parts of the country, as commercial centres and business hubs were closed down. Commercial activities were halted in Karachi as well. Enraged citizens turned out on the Sharah-e-Faisal and protested against the killing. Following reports of ransacking by enraged PPP workers, security has been put on high alert in the city.
In Multan, students of the People’s Students Federation staged a demonstration at the Bahauddin Zakariya University to condemn the assassination of the governor.
Source: Daily Times
According to details, protests broke out in Lahore, where PPP workers chanted slogans in support of the party, burned tyres and blocked traffic on The Mall, witnesses said. Shops were closed in most parts of the city, where people descended on Taseer’s residence to mourn his death. At least three people were injured in firing incidents in Badami Bagh area of Lahore. All cinemas and theatres were also abruptly closed after the assassination. Markets and shops were shut down at The Mall soon after his assassination, the channel reported.
Qaumi Tajir Ittehad (QTI) Chairman Safdar Ali Butt said the killing of the governor was highly condemnable. He said the Punjab governor was a true Muslim and lover of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He said that it was the murder of the freedom of expression in the country, adding that it was a cruel act perpetrated by terrorists who wanted to destabilise the country and its economy.
Police have been put on red alert in Gujranwala to avert any untoward incident. Enraged protestors raised anti-Punjab government slogans and demanded a proper inquiry into the incident. GT Road also remained closed for several hours. In Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Muridke, Sheikhupura, Sialkot and in other big cities of the country protesters torched tyres and raised slogans over the incident, the channel said.
An air of panic permeated in other provinces as soon as the news regarding the assassination of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer broke out. Reports of violent protests poured in from various parts of the country, as commercial centres and business hubs were closed down. Commercial activities were halted in Karachi as well. Enraged citizens turned out on the Sharah-e-Faisal and protested against the killing. Following reports of ransacking by enraged PPP workers, security has been put on high alert in the city.
In Multan, students of the People’s Students Federation staged a demonstration at the Bahauddin Zakariya University to condemn the assassination of the governor.
Source: Daily Times
Cele snubs Public Protector deadline
The Public Protector has threatened to release the preliminary findings on an investigation involving a controversial R500m property deal signed by the police chief General Bheki Cele after the contract was awarded to a billionaire businessman. A clearly disappointed advocate Thuli Madonsela told The New Age yesterday that she had sent her draft report to the SA Police Services (Saps), the Treasury and Public Works Department in early December for comment. But none of the departments had responded to the findings of the Public Protector by Monday, which was the deadline set. “I will go ahead and release the findings to the public if they did not meet my new deadline of January 21,” Madonsela said.
The Public Protector conducted the investigation together with the Special Investigating Unit, headed by Willie Hofmeyr, after a complaint laid by Paul Hoffman, the director of the South African Institute for Accountability.
Madonsela said her investigators have held two interviews with Cele on the procurement processes that were followed in the controversial deal. Asked about the findings against Cele in the report, Madonsela declined to comment further. “I am considering adverse findings against either Public Works or the Saps and my final determination will depend on the information or evidence that may come through from their comments. “We did have a meeting with (Cele) and we discussed broadly the (procurement) process and a few days later we had a lengthy interview with him.”
The Public Protector’s report into the R500m property deal has angered many senior police officials, in particular Cele, who has since appointed Bowman & Gilfillan Attorneys, one of the biggest law firms in the country, to scrutinise Madonsela’s report. According to a senior police source, Cele sought private counsel despite having state attorneys and legal advisors at his disposal. The source indicated that Cele intended to challenge Madonsela’s ruling against the police on the procurement procedures that were followed to clinch the deal. “They’ve now brought in a firm of attorneys and they’ve asked them to bring in senior counsel,” said the source.
Cele signed the deal to move Saps top police brass to businessman Roux Shabangu’s building almost two months before the billionaire bought it. This comes as Nedbank, which is financing the purchase of Middestad building in Pretoria by Shabangu, is considering to pull out of the deal. Nedbank’s Ken Reynolds confirmed yesterday that the bank had asked for a copy of Madonsela’s draft report. But he denied that this was because they wanted to pull out of the property deal. “We are just making sure that whatever investigation that has happened there was nothing irregular (about the deal),” Reynolds said. “We are just covering ourselves. We’ve asked for the report and we have not been given it.” Just weeks after details of the controversial deal were published former Public Works Minister Geoff Doidge announced that the deal had been put on ice to allow for Madonsela and Hofmeyr to investigate.
Cele’s office yesterday said the general’s decision to enlist the services of legal big guns to defend himself against the allegations contained in the report was his constitutional right. “The South African Police Service is entitled, like everyone else, to the best available legal advice,” said Maj-Gen Nonkululeko Mbatha. She said the reason Cele missed the deadline to respond to Madonsela’s report was for him “to give the report adequate and considered scrutiny”. “The public protector has more than four months to compile the report.” she said.
Source: The New Age
The Public Protector conducted the investigation together with the Special Investigating Unit, headed by Willie Hofmeyr, after a complaint laid by Paul Hoffman, the director of the South African Institute for Accountability.
Madonsela said her investigators have held two interviews with Cele on the procurement processes that were followed in the controversial deal. Asked about the findings against Cele in the report, Madonsela declined to comment further. “I am considering adverse findings against either Public Works or the Saps and my final determination will depend on the information or evidence that may come through from their comments. “We did have a meeting with (Cele) and we discussed broadly the (procurement) process and a few days later we had a lengthy interview with him.”
The Public Protector’s report into the R500m property deal has angered many senior police officials, in particular Cele, who has since appointed Bowman & Gilfillan Attorneys, one of the biggest law firms in the country, to scrutinise Madonsela’s report. According to a senior police source, Cele sought private counsel despite having state attorneys and legal advisors at his disposal. The source indicated that Cele intended to challenge Madonsela’s ruling against the police on the procurement procedures that were followed to clinch the deal. “They’ve now brought in a firm of attorneys and they’ve asked them to bring in senior counsel,” said the source.
Cele signed the deal to move Saps top police brass to businessman Roux Shabangu’s building almost two months before the billionaire bought it. This comes as Nedbank, which is financing the purchase of Middestad building in Pretoria by Shabangu, is considering to pull out of the deal. Nedbank’s Ken Reynolds confirmed yesterday that the bank had asked for a copy of Madonsela’s draft report. But he denied that this was because they wanted to pull out of the property deal. “We are just making sure that whatever investigation that has happened there was nothing irregular (about the deal),” Reynolds said. “We are just covering ourselves. We’ve asked for the report and we have not been given it.” Just weeks after details of the controversial deal were published former Public Works Minister Geoff Doidge announced that the deal had been put on ice to allow for Madonsela and Hofmeyr to investigate.
Cele’s office yesterday said the general’s decision to enlist the services of legal big guns to defend himself against the allegations contained in the report was his constitutional right. “The South African Police Service is entitled, like everyone else, to the best available legal advice,” said Maj-Gen Nonkululeko Mbatha. She said the reason Cele missed the deadline to respond to Madonsela’s report was for him “to give the report adequate and considered scrutiny”. “The public protector has more than four months to compile the report.” she said.
Source: The New Age
ANOTHER POLITICIAN MURDERED IN MPUMALANGA
Mpumalanga police are reporting that the ANC chief whip at the Ehlanzani District Council, Johannes Ndlovu, has been murdered.
Ndlovu was reportedly abducted on the way home on Tuesday evening and was apparently executed with a single shot. The murder was discovered when his wife called his mobile at midnight to check on his whereabouts. An unidentified man apparently told her: "we have killed him", before telling her where to find the body.
Ndlovu's murder falls on the 2yr anniversary of the assassination of Mbombela speaker Jimmy Mohala. Mohala's fellow councillors, including Mbombela mayor Lassy Chiwayo, claim the killing was a political assassination designed to derail his probe into 2010 World Cup irregularities.
No potential motives have been suggested yet for Ndlovu's murder.
Source: Capital
Ndlovu was reportedly abducted on the way home on Tuesday evening and was apparently executed with a single shot. The murder was discovered when his wife called his mobile at midnight to check on his whereabouts. An unidentified man apparently told her: "we have killed him", before telling her where to find the body.
Ndlovu's murder falls on the 2yr anniversary of the assassination of Mbombela speaker Jimmy Mohala. Mohala's fellow councillors, including Mbombela mayor Lassy Chiwayo, claim the killing was a political assassination designed to derail his probe into 2010 World Cup irregularities.
No potential motives have been suggested yet for Ndlovu's murder.
Source: Capital
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Governor of Punjab 'shot dead by his own bodyguard'
One of Pakistan's most senior and moderate politicians has been assassinated.
Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, was shot dead by one of his own police bodyguards in Islamabad. He had recently campaigned for the release of [Asia Bibi] a Christian woman facing the death penalty under the country's strict blasphemy laws.
Foreign Secretary William Hague called the killing shocking while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she strongly condemned the assassination.
Source: BBC
Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, was shot dead by one of his own police bodyguards in Islamabad. He had recently campaigned for the release of [Asia Bibi] a Christian woman facing the death penalty under the country's strict blasphemy laws.
Foreign Secretary William Hague called the killing shocking while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she strongly condemned the assassination.
Source: BBC
Cop arrested after teen raped
A 45-year-old Sergeant was arrested for allegedly raping a 15-year-old girl in Senwamokgope near Modjadjiskloof, Limpopo police said on Tuesday. The officer was a court orderly at the Sekgosese Magistrate's Court, Colonel Motlafela Mojapelo said. He allegedly fetched the girl from her home at Rotterdam in Hlanganani, outside Giyani, on December 28, and took her to Senwamokgope police single quarters where she was raped.
The case was reported to the police by her parents after noticing her “strange behaviour”. The officer was then arrested on Monday. The Provincial Commissioner Amon Mashigo said he strongly condemned the alleged conduct of the Sergeant and said he will be dealt with accordingly.
The officer is expected to appear in Sekgosese Magistrate's Court on Wednesday.
Source: IoL
The case was reported to the police by her parents after noticing her “strange behaviour”. The officer was then arrested on Monday. The Provincial Commissioner Amon Mashigo said he strongly condemned the alleged conduct of the Sergeant and said he will be dealt with accordingly.
The officer is expected to appear in Sekgosese Magistrate's Court on Wednesday.
Source: IoL
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