Zille loses bid to overturn tweets report
Mkhwebane’s hate speech finding reasonable — judge
Newly elected DA federal council chair Helen Zille has lost her bid to overturn public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s scathing report on her colonialism tweets. In a politically loaded judgment slammed by Zille’s lawyer, Fiona Stewart, as “very difficult to understand”, acting judge Malebo Habedi found that Mkhwebane was reasonable to find that Zille’s tweets, in which she defended the legacy of colonialism, effectively amounted to hate speech.
Newly elected DA federal council chair Helen Zille has lost her bid to overturn public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s scathing report on her colonialism tweets.
In a politically loaded judgment slammed by Zille’s lawyer, Fiona Stewart, as “very difficult to understand”, acting judge Malebo Habedi found that Mkhwebane was reasonable to find that Zille’s tweets, in which she defended the legacy of colonialism, effectively amounted to hate speech.
Stewart confirmed to Business Day that the former Western Cape premier will seek to appeal the judgment, which will no doubt give political ammunition to Zille’s opponents within the DA.
Former DA leader Mmusi Maimane and former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba both stepped down after Zille was elected as federal council chair, one of the party’s most powerful and influential positions.
Maimane stated that he had decided to resign after realising that the DA was “perhaps not the best vehicle to take forward the vision of building one SA”.
Habedi’s ruling could reinforce that view.
In the ruling handed down in the high court in Pretoria, Habedi dismissed every single one of Zille’s arguments about why Mkhwebane’s report was irrational, legally and factually flawed and should be set aside in language that was often deeply emotional.
Habedi found that Zille’s application to review the public protector’s report was moot and academic since the remedial action had directed the provincial legislature to take action against Zille while she was still Western Cape premier.
The judge nonetheless chose to examine and dismiss the arguments made by Zille in challenging that report.
“God Almighty please deliver the earth, particularly the Pan African people of Africa and its Diaspora, from this evil called colonialism,” he said after describing graphic images of the horrors of colonialism that Mkhwebane had included in her court papers.
Mkhwebane has welcomed the decision, which comes after she suffered several scathing adverse rulings that have raised serious questions about her honesty, competence and understanding of her job. She said that this was the third time she had successfully defended one of her reports in court.
Zille had sought to challenge Mkhwebane’s report on her 2017 tweets, in which she stated that the legacy of colonialism was “not all bad”, on the basis that she was exercising her constitutional right to freedom of expression when she posted them.
The former premier argued that Mkhwebane had committed a material error of fact by finding that her tweets were “likely to cause racial tensions, divisions and violence in SA” and therefore were not afforded constitutional protection.
While Zille argued there was no evidence to support this finding, Habedi said the “best evidence in this regard is the angry and threatening tweets that were sent by the public, as a result of which the premier was forced to apologise”.