ITUMELENG MAFISA and NTOMBI NKOSI
Johannesburg - Patriotic Alliance (PA) president Kenny Kunene has announced that he will be appealing an Equality Court ruling that found him guilty of hate speech in a matter between himself and EFF leader Julius Malema.
On Tuesday, the court found Kunene guilty of hate speech after referring to Malema as a “cockroach” during a media interview.
Kunene said he was convinced that a different court would come to a different conclusion on the matter.
Malema and Kunene have been engaged in endless media spats, which are now playing themselves out through the courts.
“I respect the courts in South Africa, but I have strong grounds to feel the judgment handed down by Honourable Makume J was wrong in law and will be overturned on appeal. My lawyers will be advising the high court as soon as possible that we will indeed respectfully appeal,” Kunene said.
Kunene said his lawyers would be pointing out that the judgment failed to consider the various arguments raised by his counsel in the matter.
“Which, in their opinion, resulted in the incorrect outcome, but the judgment itself is at odds with the established case law. My lawyers strongly believe that another court will come to a different decision, and therefore the appeal will be launched as a matter of urgency,” he said.
Kunene said it was unexpected of Malema to take him to court. He denied hating Malema and said involving black-on-black violence in this case was ridiculous.
“It was truly rich of Julius Malema to take me to the Equality Court when he so proudly sings ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’, which somehow isn’t hate speech,” he said.
The EFF on Tuesday evening released a statement confirming that it welcomed the finding, saying it was correct and logical.
“These comments were not only hateful, but were not considerate of the historical impact of derogatory terms used to refer to human beings, in inciting violence and genocide,” said EFF national spokesperson Sinawo Thambo.
He said genocides and hate crimes against fellow human beings began at the point of dehumanisation.
“When Adolf Hitler rationalised the genocide against the Jewish community, he referred to them as rats. When colonisers sought to pillage, enslave, rape and exploit African people, the rationale behind it was that Africans were a people without history and were barbarians whose conquest was justified in order to invite them into humanity,” he said.
Thambo went on to say that during the Rwandan genocide, when Hutus massacred Tutsi, the Tutsi were referred to as “cockroaches” on national radio and other public forums.
“Kunene was therefore not only hateful, but he was completely ignorant of the deep history that dehumanisation has in the pre-emptive stages of violence and genocide.
“The Johannesburg High Court therefore correctly found that there was no retaliatory justification for his comments and that Kunene sought to incite hate and harm towards Malema,” Thambo said.
He added that the party hoped the judgment would serve the rehabilitating purpose that the prison system has clearly failed to achieve with Kunene as an individual.
“The comments made by Kunene clearly reveal the inadequacies of our Correctional Services system in rehabilitating individuals who are prone to criminality. Kunene is a case study for the failures of the Correctional Services system, and we hope this corrective judgment will assist him become a semblance of a respectable member of society,” said Thambo.
The Star