Thanks for allowing me free speech

Andrew Kenny

This is my last column for The Citizen. My contract has ended. I am very sad but extremely grateful to The Citizen for running it for about 20 years. As I have no qualifications in journalism or the arts but only in physics and engineering, I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity.

In South Africa, as elsewhere, the range of allowed opinion is narrowing. In theory we have free speech, but actually there are more and more things we are not allowed to say and facts we are not allowed to mention.

On land reform, pertinent now with the ANC’s surrender to the EFF on “expropriation without compensation”, you will never hear any truthful account of SA’s history of land possession.

The first modern humans here were the Bushmen and Khoi, who owned all the land for over 100 000 years. Then came the Bantu in the north about 1 600 years ago. Then Dutchmen in the south 366 years ago. So who are the “rightful owners”? Honest discussion not allowed.

However, The Citizen, from democracy in 1994, allowed more open debate than other newspapers. While the others grovelled before the ANC, The Citizen, under its brave editor Martin Williams, published also the views of the tiny Democratic Party (latterly the DA), our only liberal party.

In 2008, Martin and I were sued by Robert McBride. In 1986, a month after the Pass Laws were repealed, McBride planted a bomb at a restaurant in Durban. It killed three women and wounded 50 people.

I said this made him unfit to be head of the Ekurhuleni metropolitan police. So he sued for defamation. McBride won in the High Court and Court of Appeal but in the main, lost in the Constitutional Court.

Since I could not possibly have afforded the enormous legal costs, I’d have been ruined without The Citizen’s backing. I am forever grateful for this.

On the environment, it is difficult for any journalist today to expose the unscientific nonsense that mankind is changing the climate in a dangerous way.

My background in physics makes it easy for me to do so. However, most newspapers will deny the voice of science and only accept the superstitious rubbish of charlatans like Al Gore. The Citizen has allowed me to tell the truth here. Again I am grateful.