Minority rights movement AfriForum says this day will be followed by a protest march to the Union Building on Saturday, 25 November when a memorandum of intent will be delivered to president Jacob Zuma. The march will be hosted in cooperation with the agricultural union TAU SA.
AfriForum says in a statement it will approach other organisations to become involved and urges farmers and their workers, as well as the public, to take part. Various celebrities already confirmed that they will take part in the march.
An international day of protest will take place in the preamble to the protest march and will consist of two actions. AfriForum’s local structures and safety networks will on 21 November hand over memoranda at more than 100 police stations across South Africa in which the prioritising of farm murders will be demanded. AfriForum’s Department for International Liaison is also organising that South Africans across the world on this day hand over memoranda at their embassies. A Fact Sheet, in which vital information around farm murders will be summarised, will also be distributed to international media and abroad on this day.
Ernst Roets, Deputy CEO at AfriForum, says Fikile Mbalula, the Minister of Police, has already made it clear that he has no urge to combat farm murders. There is no focussed counter strategy in place. “Farmers are tortured to death on farms in unusual ratios, and the best that the minister can do is to warn that those who transgress the law while protesting against this, will be arrested.”
“Mbalula is an accessory to the crisis. The president also made it clear that he is more obsessed with his alleged right to sing songs in which farm murders are romanticised than to do something about the crisis. Therefore, we will address this crisis ourselves. Our protest actions are therefore not to convince the minister and the president that they must solve our problems, but to show the media and international society why we are doing it ourselves,” says Roets.
“We simply have no other alternative – the onslaught on our farmers is a form of terror. We need to mobilise within the framework of the law. Community structures are at the centre of a safe future. AfriForum already has more than 100 established safety structures across the country and the public is encouraged to become a part hereof. We however need every citizen’s cooperation and support in order to expand safety structures,” says Ian Cameron, Head of Safety at AfriForum.
The public is invited to register on the website stopdiemoorde.co.za to confirm that they
will be taking part in the protest march.
South Africans abroad that want to take part in the international day of protest on 21 November, can contact AfriForum by sending an email to wereldwyd@afriforum.co.za.
For more information about AfriForum’s safety structures, send an email to veiligheid@afriforum.co.za.
