President Jacob Zuma’s son Edward Zuma has lashed out at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), calling it a “vile dog unleashed to maul the black majority”.
The commission this week found that an open letter penned by Edward Zuma promoted hatred on the basis of race and had violated the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
The open letter was addressed to former senior cabinet ministers Derek Hanekom and Pravin Gordhan, fired by Jacob Zuma in his midnight cabinet reshuffle earlier this year.
In the diatribe, Edward Zuma called Gordhan, former finance minister, a sell-out and “one of the most corrupt cadres of the ANC who thinks African natives are no better than just being sugar cane cutters who must be forever subservient to a master like him for sustenance”. Former tourism minister Hanekom, according to Edward Zuma, was a “white Afrikaner askari” and sell-out.
The SAHRC said it would seek appropriate redress for the contents of Edward Zuma’s open letter.
In his response to the SAHRC, received by ANA on Saturday morning, Zuma said: “One is not surprised by the continuous senseless suppression, censure, bias, and native witch-hunt which is continuously wedged (sic) by institutions such as the SAHRC – as in the case against me but really in essence, broadly, the case against me is the suppression of the articulation of black pain, historically experienced by millions of natives in our country.
“I view, as I have always viewed the SAHRC, in particular its stance against me right now, as a vile dog unleashed to maul the black majority, to manage them, to sanitise their history, and to keep them in check when expressing their history and articulating their black pain,” he said.
Edward Zuma said the SAHRC had been “perverted” since its creation and now served as “nothing more than a post-apartheid champion of the exclusive protection of the minority settler rights, in the main, the white colonial settlers and their offspring the white monopoly capital”.
– African News Agency (ANA)
