EFF leaves calling card for Adam US takes a more cautionary stance on SA land debate
Members march on Catzavelos’s home to show him that racism has no place in SA
PARLIAMENT has warned members of parties from questioning the credibility of a report which found that most of the people in the written submissions did not want an amendment to the Constitution to expropriate land without compensation.
Speaker Baleka Mbete told parties they needed to respect processes followed by Parliament to commission a company to compile a report on the submissions made.
Out of the 149 000 submissions, the report found that 89 000 people said they did not want expropriation without compensation.
The other 60 000 people in the written submissions were in favour of the process to amend the Constitution.
The EFF has already questioned the report.
Mbete told the programming committee that they will look into the matter and will soon meet some officials in the national legislature.
But she insisted that it was not correct to question the report and processes followed by Parliament to get the company.
“I agree that if aspersions are cast on the mechanism we are using, it is not good.
“I don’t think we should allow a process where there are pronouncements in the public,” said Mbete.
House chairperson Cedric Frolick said the report was not yet complete.
The company had finalised a preliminary report into 149 000 out of 700 000 written submissions.
This was not a complete picture of what the final report would be, said Frolick.
‘WE just want to talk, come out Adam, the sky is blue, the weather is nice, k ***** s are all over the place.”
These were the words that Ekurhuleni EFF members shouted outside Adam Catzavelos’s Edenvale home yesterday.
They said they had “visited” the residence to send a message to him following a racist video in which he apparently used the k-word to refer to black people.
“It is important for us to be here because we have seen racism raising its ugly head a number of times.
“We want to tell and show Adam and other whites that racism has no place in our democratic society,” said Fani Sibeko, the EFF’S Ekurhuleni PR councillor.
He said they received a tip-off from the security guards in the area that Catzavelos was in the house, as they had seen him in the morning.
Despite the shouting and picketing at the gate, no one came out of the house nor was there any sound or movement. There was just a white BMW parked in the yard.
EFF members left placards at his gate with messages such as “Adam, jou pink p**s”, “our democracy has no space for racists like Adam” and “Adam where are you, go back to Greece, you pig”.
A white neighbour, who declined to be named, expressed her solidarity with the party’s protest. “It is important for everyone to stand against racism and it’s no longer acceptable to just be quiet,” she said.
Edenvale police were also at the scene and by lunchtime their presence started increasing swiftly. The party was then instructed to disperse as they were contravening the “gathering act”.
Sipho Watkins, EFF Ekurhuleni secretary, said he was confident that they had sent out a message to Catzavelos and other racists.
“We came and did what we needed to do. The message has been sent and he knows not to mess with black people,” added Watkins.
On Wednesday, the EFF’S Gauteng branch opened a case against Catzavelos at the Bramley police station.
“The case was registered in Bramley but the matter occurred in Greece,” said national police spokesperson Colonel Brenda Muridili. “It will be taken from the police station level to provincial, then head office and then Interpol, who will liaise with Greece and, from that point on, more investigations will be done based on Greece’s findings.”
However, Verlie Oosthuizen, head of social media law at the firm, Shepstone & Wylie, said it would be difficult to lay criminal charges against Catzavelos.
“While his utterances are certainly repugnant and deeply insulting and hurtful, they are not at this stage criminal. Discriminatory speech on the basis of race is not a criminal offence,” said Oosthuizen.
“There can be legal consequences outside of criminal law for Mr Catzavelos. However, I do not think that there are criminal charges which can be brought against him.”
Oosthuizen added that it would be challenging to prosecute Catzavelos for crimen injuria. “I do not think that the video satisfies this legal definition as it was not directed at a particular individual with the intention of impairing his or her dignity.”
Catzavelos’s video was apparently first posted on a private Whatsapp group, and was circulated by a member of the group offended by its content.
The Joburg businessman’s personal details such as his home and work address, cellphone number, ID number and his children’s school address were leaked. This was unacceptable, said Oosthuizen.
“This particular type of scenario is known as ‘doxing’ and is not acceptable, particularly when the personal information of his children is revealed. When the Protection of Personal Information Act is fully enforced, then there may be sanctions for this type of behaviour and it will be unlawful.
“There can be no doubt that the comments and video Catzavelos made are odious and unacceptable. However, there are legal mechanisms that can be used for the public to show their displeasure.”
Oosthuizen added that the sharing of personal information about a person online could lead to intimidation and violence against that person or his family. “This is dangerous and should be completely discouraged.”
The SA Human Rights Commission confirmed that Catzavelos would be investigated. US PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s controversial tweet may have rattled markets and sentiment, but all eyes now will be on how his Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, handles his “study” on land seizures and farmer killings.
“Secretary Pompeo is not going to jump on a plane to attend to land issues in South Africa. That is not how processes work,” said international relations expert Brooks Spector.
“There is a US embassy in South Africa. It’s their job to follow public policy and debate so that they can provide regular reports to Washington. Those reports provide insights on investment and the politics of the country,” he said.
On Thursday the US State Department offered a more cautionary statement on the land plans, saying they couldn’t be compared to “Zimbabwe’s disastrous land seizures”.
“The State Department is being cautious and conservative and hopefully that will be the report that Trump will get from his officials, including from his embassy here,” said Peter Fabricius, a consultant at the Institute for Security Studies.
Fabricius said he would be concerned about Trump’s tweet, which called on Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the largescale killing of farmers”. “South African government is now seizing land from white farmers.”
“The danger is that they may decide to cut off African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) benefits, and that is the potential hazard,” said Fabricius.
“They could theoretically argue that one of the conditions of Agoa is respect for private property.”
Spector, however, dismissed sentiments that if “land seizures” continue it will put the country’s eligibility for Agoa under threat.
“It is unlikely that eligibility will be compromised by an orderly constitutional, legitimate, legal process that moves towards land reform because it would be consistent with legal circumstances of the country.
“It will certainly not collapse it. Even if South Africa was not eligible for Agoa status. It does not collapse Agoa, because it is American law, it’s not a treaty.”
Former US ambassador to South Africa, Patrick Gaspard, expressed outrage at Trump’s gross misreading
Trump knows nothing of the apartheid legacy
of land reform issues in an opinion piece published in the New York Daily News.
“It’s hard to know which is worse: watching the president of the US taking policy notes from rabid talking heads on Fox News, or seeing an unindicted co-conspirator attempting to divert our gaze away from his criminal cabal by seeking to legitimise a dangerous racial myth about another country.
“Trump knows nothing of the effort to undo the poisonous economic legacy of apartheid that has left black people owning just 4% of farms, despite making up 78% of the population. (Whites own 72%, despite making up just 9% of the population.)”
“The thing about Trump is that he has said a lot of things along the way that people thought was just rhetoric, but he has gone some distance towards implementing these things and this is something to be wary of,” said Fabricius.