Judge Nkola Motata was found guilty of drunkenly driving his car into a house 10 years ago. He is only facing an impeachment probe now.
Judge Nkola Motata said that the statements he made after he drunkenly crashed his car into a wall in 2007 were “not at all” racist.
Motata was responding to allegations of judicial misconduct at a judicial conduct tribunal on Wednesday. The tribunal was set up to investigate two complaints arising from the car accident at the property of Richard Baird and the criminal trial that followed.
The tribunal must decide whether the statements made by the Pretoria high court judge, now retired, at the scene of the accident were racist. And, if so, whether it would make him guilty of gross misconduct – which would open the way for him to be impeached.
The tribunal is also looking into a second complaint by senior counsel Gerrit Pretorius about the way Motata conducted his defence in his drunken driving trial, at which he was convicted. Pretorius said that when his counsel put it to a witness that Motata would say he was not drunk, this was putting a version that he knew to be false – a grave breach of judicial ethics.
AfriForum’s Kallie Kriel testified that Motata’s “rant” at the scene “was solely based on the colour of the skin of Mr Baird – nothing else whatsoever”.
One of the statements referred to by Kriel was when Motata was recorded to have said: “Yes, but you know all of you, let me just tell you, most of us this is our world, it is not the world of the boers. Even if they can have big bodies, South Africa is ours.”
“Even if I can drive into it I will pay it. It is not a problem that I can pay for the wall but he must not criticise me. There is no boer who will criticise me”.
Kriel said the context in which the statements were made perpetuated racist stereotypes of white people as “inherently racist, bullyish, of a specific physical appearance, no regard for any other person, unsophisticated, unrepentant, the ever-oppressor and an unethical and immoral person”.
But Motata said that the statements were “not at all” racist and he was not a racist. He said he was speaking Setswana and that when he said “leburu le”, he was talking to the Sesotho-speaking metro police officers and was identifying Baird specifically – the only white and “thick-set” person at the scene.
“The traffic officers had wanted us to leave. I said I could not leave because my keys had been taken by that leburu, the thick set one.”
He had also been extremely provoked, he said, and the trial court had agreed. He felt disparaged by Baird because, after waiting for over an hour for him to arrive so that he could make amends over the broken wall, Baird had immediately, “without introducing himself to me”, taken his car keys out of the car.
“If you take my keys when I have waited for you, what are you saying about me? Am I a flight risk when I have waited for somebody? I waited, I did not run away from the scene.”
He added that when he said South Africa was “ours”, he meant it now belonged to all South Africans as opposed to only white people as it had been before.
Kriel said that, in isolation, the word leburu may not be offensive, but in context it was.
Baird was not called as a witness before the tribunal but was seated in the audience and took to Twitter to deny that he had provoked the judge: “False. No provocation by me. #Motata got agitated whenever mention was made of drunkenness & when he wanted his keys … Lucky Melk my former tenant took his keys before I got there. Melk called me to the scene.”
The tribunal will hear closing argument on Friday.