It is worrying that there are increasingly desperate and shrill attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the IEC by making unsubstantiated and spurious allegations to raise public suspicion about its impartiality and honesty. The decision by the Electoral Court to overturn the decision by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) that Jacob Zuma was not eligible to contest a seat in Parliament came as somewhat of a surprise. This is so because the original decision seemed to be in line with the plain meaning of section 47(1)(e) of the Constitution which states that a citizen who “is convic ..read more

Whether Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula remains Speaker of the National Assembly is not a legal matter. Neither is it a matter of the application of the ANC’s step-aside rule, as that rule applies to stepping aside from party activities. As with all the previous ANC decisions to replace the Speaker, this is a purely political decision that the ANC caucus is entitled to make. The position of the Speaker of the National Assembly, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, who faces arrest for allegedly soliciting cash bribes while she was minister of defence to secure contracts with the SA National Defence Force, has bec ..read more

Apart from the odd statement demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, South African universities have, by and large, remained silent about the ongoing killing of Palestinian civilians, an onslaught that the International Court of Justice recently found could plausibly amount to genocide. Confronted with what Pankaj Mishra rightly describes in the most recent London Review of Books as the Israeli “liquidation of Gaza”, an onslaught “whose victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer who is South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, ‘are broadcasting thei ..read more

The (at the very least) incestuous practice of appointing all-male and all-white legal teams breeds (or perpetuates) a special kind of elite mediocrity. The only people who seem to be oblivious to this problem are those who benefit from it. Over the weekend, the conservative Afrikaans Sunday newspaper Rapport carried an indignant front-page report about the request made by a judge of the Gauteng High Court to the all-white legal teams who appeared before him in a case dealing with Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment to explain the “failure to have even a single black lawyer in this matter ..read more

Staunch defenders of abusive practices at Stellenbosch University residences like Wilgenhof resist change, and cling to a version of their old exclusionary identity, one that is defined in opposition to a larger South African identity. Maties must root out toxic and exclusionary culture exposed at Wilgenhof, but is it brave enough?  I lived in Wilgenhof men’s residence (“Die Plek”) in 1984 and 1985 during the first two years of my undergraduate studies at Stellenbosch University. At that time, an authoritarian Afrikaner nationalist ethos permeated the University (at the time State Preside ..read more

What the Teeger case illustrates is just how difficult it is to devise (and consistently apply) a clear set of free speech principles to ensure the fair and consistent regulation of controversial statements made by members and captains of national sporting teams in accordance with democratic values of dignity, freedom and equality. The decision by Cricket South Africa (CSA) to relieve David Teeger of his captaincy of the South African Under-19 cricket team, ostensibly because of a risk that protests about the Israeli war on Gaza could “result in conflict or even violence” at the Under-19 World ..read more

Plaza Revolución, Havana I have been travelling through Cuba over the past three weeks — a country venerated for its socialist commitments by both faux and sincere ‘revolutionaries’. But I still do not understand much about the country. The facts do not fit the theory, because the ideological framework that most South Africans — from the left and the right — rely on to make political and economic sense of the world doesn’t seem to work here. The first thing that strikes me on my arrival in Havana is not all the beautiful vintage cars — although it’s hard to miss them once you start noticing ..read more

I have always had a complicated relationship with rugby and the Springboks, a relationship almost as complicated as (and inextricably linked to) the relationship between me and my late father. As a boy, I loved rugby and the Springboks above all else. One could say I loved the Springboks as fiercely as I yearned for my father to love and like me. When I saw the Springbok prop Trevor Nyakane celebrate the Springbok rugby team’s victory on Saturday with his killer dance moves, I immediately thought of Uncle Norman, Trevor’s dad, and Trevor’s sisters, Abigail and Rhulani. Back in 2015, Afrikaans ..read more

Malema’s claims outside the East London Magistrates’ Court were intended to delegitimise the trial and its outcome, and to intimidate the court into ruling in his favour. Over the past decade, as the broadcasting of court proceedings have become commonplace, populist attacks on judicial officers and the judgments they produce have become more conspiracy-fuelled and hysterical — particularly in politically charged cases. While much of this kind of speech (no matter how uninformed or unhinged) is protected by section 16 of the Constitution, accusing a presiding officer of dishonesty and corrupti ..read more

What kind of lawyer would be brazen enough to advance such mendacious legal arguments on behalf of their equally mendacious client, knowing there is zero chance that the challenge will succeed? Earlier this week Jacob Zuma and the JG Zuma Foundation announced that they are proceeding with their court challenge to review and set aside the appointment of Justice Raymond Zondo as the Chief Justice of South Africa. The challenge is a legal nonsense and an abuse of the court process, and thus yet another attempt by Zuma to delegitimise the State Capture Report as well as the Constitutional Court to ..read more