Tributes pour in for ‘justice par excellence’
1939-2015
JUSTICE Thembile Lewis Skweyiya was the “embodiment of fairness, devotion, humility and professionalism”, and all South Africans should emulate him.
So said Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa at Skweyiya’s funeral, held at the Durban City Hall yesterday.
Ramaphosa said all Skweyiya wanted was to be a medical doctor but the late human rights lawyer Griffiths Mxenge advised him to enrol for a law degree. He went on to be South Africa’s first black senior counsel.
“He became a great jurist. His judgments changed people’s lives. Let’s emulate his outstanding attributes.”
Before Ramaphosa, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng paid a glowing tribute to his former colleague.
“He was my neighbour in the workplace as his chamber was next to mine. I was struck by his humility. I first heard about Lewis Skweyiya when I enrolled at the University of Zululand in 1981.
“I was in awe of this black advocate and when he came to the University of Natal we jostled to see his face and we were inspired.
“He wasn’t hungry for money but he was wealthy,” said Mogoeng, adding that Skweyiya had been a “justice par excellence”.
Top legal minds, cabinet ministers, academics and traditional leaders gathered to pay their last respects to Skweyiya, who died this week at the age of 76.
Speaker after speaker echoed Ramaphosa and Mogoeng’s praises about Skweyiya.
Thembisa Dingaan described her father as someone who wanted the best for his family
He became a great jurist. His judgments changed people’s lives
and expected the best out of them.
“He wanted us to be global citizens,” she said.
Among those who went to pay their last respects were Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe, Justice Minister Michael Masutha, former first lady Zanele Mbeki, Bafokeng king Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi, University of Fort Hare vice-chancellor Mvuyo Tom, president of the Supreme Court of Appeals Judge Lex Mpati and Deputy Labour Minister Phathekile Holomisa.
Skweyiya is survived by his wife, Sayo, four children and five grandchildren.
THEMBILE Skweyiya, who has died at the age of 76, was a human rights lawyer and Constitutional Court judge. He was the first black African lawyer to be made a senior counsel.
In 1991, Skweyiya was appointed by Nelson Mandela to head an ANC commission of inquiry into the notorious detention camps the ANC ran in exile.
Skweyiya’s brother, Zola, future cabinet minister and UK high commissioner, had been blocked in his brief to supervise justice in the ANC camps in Angola in the ’80s.
First-hand accounts of the torture and execution of ANC cadres in these camps appeared in the British media in 1990, compelling a response.
Powerful forces in the ANC, including Chris Hani, who was leader of the SACP and deputy head of Umkhonto weSizwe when many of the atrocities were committed, and Jacob Zuma, who was head of counterintelligence in MK, furiously opposed any kind of inquiry. Mandela, after speaking to Pallo Jordan, who had been detained by the ANC security department in 1983 and held in isolation for six weeks, overruled them.
But the terms of reference he handed to Skweyiya and his fellow commissioners limited the inquiry to complaints about their conditions made by living former prisoners and detainees in the detention camps.
By definition, Mandela’s restrictive terms of reference excluded an investigation into the torture, murder and disappearance of many others. This made it almost inevitable that the Skweyiya report would be regarded as a whitewash rather than a proper attempt to uncover the truth about human rights atrocities in the camps.
Sadly, this is what happened. ANC leaders who had been implicated by witnesses and a previous internal ANC report flourished Skweyiya’s report as evidence that they’d been given
PERCEPTIVE: Thembile Skweyiya a clean bill of health.
Skweyiya was not allowed to subpoena witnesses, compel them to answer questions or cross-examine them. Thus, Hani, who had been named a prime culprit of abuses in the 1990 revelations, was allowed to get away with an expression of “concern” about the “horrors of Quatro” (a camp in Angola), duly and uncritically noted by Skweyiya in his report.
The ANC’s excuse for the torture and execution of detainees in its detention camps was that they were agents of the apartheid regime.
Skweyiya was at least able to debunk this as a lie.
His report made it clear that MK members were detained without trial, and recommended that allegations that they were apartheid agents be “unequivocally and unconditionally withdrawn”.
He also recommended that “urgent and immediate attention be given to identifying and dealing with those responsible”. This led to the more comprehensive commission that was established by the ANC the following year, 1993, under Dr Sam Motsuenyane, which found the ANC guilty of human rights abuses in its camps.
Skweyiya was born in Worcester in the Cape on June 17 1939. After matriculating at the Healdtown Methodist college in the Eastern Cape, he obtained a BSc and LLB degrees at the University of Natal, and began his legal career in 1968.
He was admitted as an advocate in 1970, and from 1979 dedicated his Durban-based practice to defending political activists. He represented Jeff Radebe, now minister in the presidency, after he was sentenced to 10 years on Robben Island and got his sentence cut to six.
He also represented Sibusiso Zondo, who was hanged at the age of 19 for bombing an Amanzimtoti shopping centre.
Among those serving their pupillage with him was former chief justice Pius Langa.
In 1989, he was the first black African to take silk, something that gave him little pride.
“It is not something which makes me happy, you know, to be regarded as the first [African] silk when the first silk in this country was in the ’40s or even earlier,” he said in his interview by the Judicial Service Commission.
He became a high court judge in KwaZulu-Natal in 2001 and was permanently appointed to the Constitutional Court in 2003 after being an acting constitutional court judge for two years.
Some of his most perceptive judgments in the Constitutional Court were in defence of the rights of children. He also wrote important judgments on the rule of law and media freedom.
He fiercely defended the independence of the courts against government interference and bullying. In 2012, after a barrage of such assaults by ANC politicians and cabinet ministers, he told students at the University of Fort Hare, where he’d been made chancellor in 2008, that attacks on the judiciary “smack of a fundamental misunderstanding of the kind of democratic model that we, as a nation, endorsed when agreeing upon the 34 constitutional principles on which our final constitution is based”.
Skweyiya, who retired from the Constitutional Court in 2014, is survived by his wife, Sayo, and four children. — Chris Barron
He was the first black African to take silk, but this gave him little pride