Malema says Afrikaner asylum seekers look like ‘car guards’, not farmers:
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema says none of the Afrikaners who left South Africa for the United States last week under refugee status are farmers, but instead appeared to be “car guards”.
Malema made the remarks while addressing scores of EFF supporters outside the Union Buildings on Monday ahead of a march to the treasury.
He said anyone who had ties with the 49 Afrikaners should provide their addresses so that their status as farmers could be verified.
“We don’t have a problem. People left voluntarily, we are just asking for the addresses of those farms that they left. We will make a plan for them. We cannot allow for land not to be used.
“If they are real farmers, why is the media not giving us the list of the farms that were left by farmers who went to America? Nothing looked like a farmer among those people. They looked like car guards.”
The extension of refugee status to Afrikaners was done by US president Donald Trump earlier this year. The policy has also been extended to other minorities in South Africa who could show “either a history of persecution or a credible fear of future persecution”.
Since his first term in office, Trump has maintained that Afrikaner farmers are being attacked because of their race. He has, on several occasions, referred to white farmers as being victims of “genocide”.
Farm killings remain an emotive topic in the country, which is riddled with excessive levels of violent crime.
In March, the constitutional court, South Africa’s apex court, refused AfriForum leave to appeal against a supreme court ruling that the song “kill the boer” does not constitute hate speech.
The song is often sung by Malema – who has made inflammatory remarks about white and Indian South Africans – at EFF gatherings.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is set to meet Trump on Wednesday where, among other things, the notion of “white genocide” and Afrikaner persecution are expected to be discussed.
Speaking to journalists on Saturday, Ramaphosa said there was no genocide in South Africa, a fact that was borne out by evidence.
He told the journalists that the two trading partners would be talking trade.
“Just as he [ Trump] meets with other people and I also meet with other people, it’s state to state [and] we’re representing our people. We are going to have good discussions on trade,” he said.
Speaking to his party supporters on Monday, Malema said Ramaphosa would be disrespected in the US.
“Those people know that there’s no white person being killed in South Africa, but they use it to make us change our policies.”
He said South Africans must reject the “propaganda”.
Should there have been murders of white people because of their race or because they were farmers, those pushing the narrative would have been the first to leave, he said.
“Why is [AfriForum chief executive Kallie] Kriel not going to America, because he is the one who claims that people are being killed? He must lead by example and go to America, [former AfriForum deputy chief executive Ernst] Roets must lead by example and go to America.”
“They can’t go because they live a very good life here. When they go to America, they are going to become hobos with immediate effect,” said Malema.
Ramaphosa says decision to sign NHI Bill was politically sensitive:
President Cyril Ramaphosa has argued in papers filed to the Pretoria high court that its ruling compelling him to submit his record of decision on assenting to the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act was flawed on 10 counts.
He is appealing the court’s order to hand over the record to the supreme court of appeal (SCA) but indicated that he would also appeal directly to the constitutional court by 27 May. Should the apex court grant him direct access, the president said he would not persist in his application to the SCA.
Ramaphosa argued that the high court made grave errors in law when, in a ruling handed down on 6 May in favour of the Board of Healthcare Funders (BHF), it held that his decision was reviewable and ordered him to hand over the record within 10 calendar days.
He advanced 10 grounds of review, including that the court lacked jurisdiction in the matter and erred in finding that his decision to sign the NHI Bill into law was reviewable.
Because BHF alleged a failure by the president to fulfil his constitutional duty, Ramaphosa submitted, only the apex court could hear the matter because it alone has the power to determine whether that is so in terms of section 167(4)(e) of the Constitution.
His counsel had argued before the high court that the obligation imposed on the president in section 79 of the Constitution to assent to legislation was assigned only to himself, or an acting president in the case of his absence.
Therefore any breach of this obligation triggered the exclusive jurisdiction of the constitutional court.
They further argued that when deciding whether to assent to a law, the president was exercising a subjective discretion bestowed on him by section 79 of the Constitution.
It was up to him to decide how he went about reaching his decision and an attempt to review this decision in court had significant implications for the separation of powers.
Allowing a high court review would also mean that any person who was unhappy with his decision to sign a Bill into law and had enough money to launch litigation could embark on a courtroom “fishing expedition” to find a flaw in his reasoning.
In this instance, the president’s lawyers argued, the BHF could not point to any reviewable lapse in the process he had followed, yet was trying to halt a legislative process designed to meet the healthcare needs of the whole country.
The BHF, which represents most private medical schemes in South Africa, had argued that Ramaphosa flouted his constitutional duty by failing to scrutinise the constitutionality of the NHI Bill.
It said he acted irrationally when he signed it into law on 15 May 2024 because he ignored submissions that pointed to the patent constitutional defects in the legislation. The BHF said section 79 did not give him untrammelled powers but compelled him to send the Bill back to parliament to remedy these.
The court found no merit in the president’s argument on the separation of powers, and said the step of assenting to a Bill was but part of a lawmaking process that was a reviewable exercise in public power.
“The issue is whether the president has properly applied his mind as required by section 79 of the Constitution when he assented to and signed the NHI Bill after receiving all the objections to the constitutionality of the Bill from the stakeholders including his own legal advisers,” the court said.
“This cannot be said to be intruding into the domain of the principal legislative and executive organs of state which would bring the matter into the remit of the exclusive jurisdiction of the constitutional court.”
It held that a legislative process implies a shared obligation on the National Assembly, the National Council of Provinces and that hence, the case fell within the jurisdiction of the high court.
As to whether Ramaphosa’s decision was reviewable, the court said he exercised the power to sign Bills as a central part to a legislative process. And since all public power must be exercised within the bounds of legality, and this particular one within the constraints of section 79(1) of the Constitution, it was subject to legal review.
Ramaphosa challenged this in the application for leave to appeal filed last week.
“The court reasoned that the president’s obligations are not agent-specific and do not engage the exclusive jurisdiction of the constitutional court,” he submitted. “Respectfully, the court ought to have found the opposite.”
The court was inconsistent, because on the one hand it said the case revolved around his duty, in terms of section 79, to scrutinise the constitutionality of the Bill, yet on the other that the “conduct which is challenged by the applicants in this case does not fall in the category of the president’s failures in fulfilling his constitutional obligations”.
Both could not be true at the same time.
Nor could the court rightly find that assenting to a law was not “agent-specific” when only the president had the power to do so.
Furthermore, Ramaphosa submitted, the separation of powers was implicated because the function he performed in signing a Bill into law was not a legislative one.
“If it were, that would constitute a demonstrable incursion into the terrain of the legislature and breach the separation of powers.”
Ramaphosa argued that assenting to legislation was a politically sensitive matter, where it was left to the president to determine which considerations he had to bear in mind when fulfilling a particular obligation.
It meant “sensitive” not in a party political sense but in the context of separation of powers in that a court had to exercise “extreme caution in determining whether it is capable of second-guessing or assessing” his decision.
The high court had ignored a warning from the apex court, through case law, that in such matters, “which are by their very nature politically sensitive matters”, only it had jurisdiction.
The president signed the Bill into law a fortnight before last year’s general elections. Critics of the decision have said it was a populist move at a moment when it was clear to the ANC that it risked losing its majority.
The legislation has remained one of the main sources of friction in the unity government Ramaphosa assembled after his party won only 40% of the vote.
Why so many newborns and foetuses are abandoned in landfills and the veld:
They were wrapped in plastic or foil or a piece of clothing, tucked inside a backpack or pulled from a burnt pile of rubbish. Those were some of the ways the remains of newborns and foetuses were found before being taken to the Diepkloof Forensic Pathology Service in Soweto.
Although discoveries like these rarely make the news, they are a regular occurrence. The bodies are found in open veld, public toilets and landfills across South Africa.
To help figure out why, researchers from Wits University gathered data about the remains that landed up at the Diepkloof facility from 2020 to 2021 and in 2023. They hope by tracking where the bodies were found and the causes of death, they will better understand why so many women take desperate measures instead of seeking legal and safe abortions.
Studies show this is extremely rare in countries like Germany (150 cases over 15 years) or Denmark (11 cases over 12 years). Meanwhile, research published in 2014 in the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ) found about 1 658 cases in Mpumalanga and Gauteng alone from 2009 to 2011.
Of the 158 cases in the Diepkloof facility studied, 68 were found to be non-viable, which means they would not be able to survive outside of the mother; 29 were stillborn — when a foetus dies in the womb after 20 weeks of pregnancy. In a third of the cases, the cause of death couldn’t be determined because the bodies were severely mutilated or were too badly decomposed.
The researchers — Rachel Gill, Roxanne Thornton and Shakeera Holland — believe the high number of non-viable cases could be linked to illegal abortions, something backed up by the SAMJ study.
Their initial findings point to a lack of information and education about abortion and inadequate medical care, which reproductive health specialists agree are the main reasons women are driven to unsafe abortion providers.
In a recent episode of Bhekisisa’s monthly TV programme, Health Beat, we spoke to Holland, who heads up forensic medicine and pathology at Wits University and leads investigations of unnatural deaths in eight forensic pathology facilities in Gauteng — the busiest region in the country, which handles about 28% of all the unnatural death investigations in the country.
Mia Malan spoke to her at Soweto’s forensic pathology service facilities in Diepkloof. This interview was edited for clarity.
Mia Malan: How many abandoned foetuses and newborns are found?
Shakeera Holland: We don’t have accurate statistics about this because there is no digital database of unnatural deaths in the whole of South Africa. What we do know is that we have about 70 000 unnatural deaths in South Africa, and of those, we estimate that approximately 2% are abandoned neonates [newborns in the first few weeks of life] and foetuses.
MM: In the study you supervised at the mortuary, where were the remains of these abandoned foetuses and newborns found?
SH: The majority of the time, the remains are left where it is convenient, and probably where people think they won’t be found easily. So usually in open veld, landfills and dumping areas. It’s less common to find them in toilets in shopping centres and other public toilets.
MM: Is there a difference in the number of female remains versus male remains?
SH: Most of the foetuses in our study were male. And most of our paediatric deaths happen to be more commonly in boys than girls — and this is what we see in international studies as well.
MM: What do your autopsies show? What are the causes of death?
SH: The most common cause that we see are non-viable foetuses. This means that the foetuses haven’t completed sufficient time in the pregnancy for them to survive outside of the mother.
We also see a lot of stillbirths. These are babies that have completed enough gestational time in the mother to be considered viable, but they’re not born deceased. In a minority of the causes we see trauma, and that can either be accidental or homicidal — but this is in very few cases.
MM: What are the most common causes of the trauma?
SH: A lot of the common causes are head injuries, and a few are related to suffocation, and we’ve maybe had one or two where there’s sharp force injury. For example, the foetuses or neonates have had their necks cut.
MM: Why did you do the study?
SH: We see these cases of abandoned neonates and foetuses every day. You see newspaper reports about these cases, but they make it seem as if they never happen.
In fact, they are happening every single day. I had a student that was particularly passionate about the topic and wanted to look at what is exactly going on in this area, and hopefully spark research in other places, because we don’t know much about it.
MM: So when a foetus or neonate lands here, what happens to it?
SH: They undergo a medical and legal post-mortem examination, which includes an autopsy. That autopsy includes any investigations that are necessary to determine the cause and circumstances of death. Once that is completed, we compile a post-mortem report.
That report then goes to the South African Police Service for further investigation, for them to decide whether or not there needs to be prosecution in this case and what happens to the remains. In foetuses that are less than 26 weeks the remains are discarded as medical waste. Neonates of 26 weeks and older are buried as paupers if nobody claims the remains, which means the state assumes the cost of the burial.
MM: Do you have enough doctors to conduct these autopsies?
SH: At present, our doctors are doing between 500 to 600 post-mortems per doctor per year. The ideal amount would be about 250 because we need to take into consideration that the process is not just doing autopsies. In fact, the doctor has to do the autopsy then compile a meticulous report that needs to stand up in court.
MM: We have more than 1 000 unemployed doctors in this country. Why can’t you use them?
SH: We do not have enough funded posts for doctors, even though we do have a lot of doctors who would like to come and work in our service.
MM: Have you got a specific policy intervention you’d like to see?
SH: That’s exactly why we do these studies. We’re hoping that if we are able to shine a light on where the problems lie, we are able to give a basis for policy development to show where intervention is necessary.
I think it’s very sad that the law provides for women as young as 12 to have access to contraception without parental consent if the child has a clear understanding of the process. But I feel like perhaps girls do not know enough about it, or they are not getting safe access to the service — and it’s the same with termination of pregnancy. So it’s a lack of knowledge perhaps, or perhaps it’s a lack of access for these young women.
This story is based on the Health Beat TV programme, “Why are thousands of babies dumped each year in SA instead of being safely aborted?,” which was broadcast on 29 March on eNCA. View the full programme on Bhekisisa’s YouTube channel.
If you are seeking information about abortion services, Where to Care has a list of providers in South Africa, which is regularly updated.
This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.
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