Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille on Friday stepped up her protest that the SA Human Rights Commission and other Chapter Nine institutions were being used by the ruling party to target the opposition.
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She likened the HRC’s investigation of the removal of shacks in Hangberg by the city of Cape Town to the work of the discredited Erasmus Commission.
“The Cape High Court found that the Erasmus Commission set up by former premier Ebrahim Rasool was a political hit squad designed to impugn the DA’s reputation in the run-up to an election,” Zille wrote in her weekly newsletter.
“Just like the Erasmus Commission, the potential for the HRC investigation to be a poison-dripping tap, over many months, in the run-up to the local election next year is obvious.”
She said she expected her criticism of the probe to “again incur the wrath of the analysts, experts and editors” as it did two years ago when she said Judge Nathan Erasmus was being abused by the ANC to wage a political battle against her party.
Zille said it was ironic that those who thought she was out of line had no reservations about criticising the ANC’s planned media appeal tribunal.
“It is deeply ironic that most analysts and editors are strongly opposed to the ANC’s proposal for a media tribunal because they recognise that it will be abused by the majority party to settle political scores with the media and control what it reports on.
“And yet they don’t seem to accept the possibility that Chapter Nine institutions — whose members are also appointed by Parliament — could possibly be abused by the ANC for exactly the same ends.”
Zille dismissed HRC Chairperson Lawrence Mushwana’s statement that her allegations that the institution was being politicised had no foundation.
Strategic deployment
She quoted ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe as saying last month that commissioner Janet Love and police chief Bheki Cele had resigned from the ANC’s National Executive Committee due to their “deployment to strategic state departments and institutions.”
Said Zille: “There you have it. The ANC itself freely admits that Janet Love’s deployment to the HRC was a ‘strategic’ deployment. This should set alarm bells ringing for anybody who treasures the independence of our Chapter Nine institutions.”
She said she was not criticising the HRC as an institution.
“We are fully supportive of all the institutions with a constitutional mandate to check and balance power.
“What we object to is the politicisation and abuse of these institutions by the ANC through cadre deployment. It is the deployment of ANC cadres to Chapter Nine institutions that breaches the spirit of the Constitution, not our criticism of it.”
Hangberg residents are involved in a bitter wrangle with local authorities over a decision to remove shacks from the slopes of the Sentinel mountainside.
The HRC has said it launched its investigation in response to complaints from aggrieved informal settlement dwellers, denying that the probe had anything to do with upcoming local government elections next year. — Sapa