Zuma was quoted saying the above at the opening of National House of Traditional Leaders in Parliament. The Times in South Africa reported the Prez then went on to say: “Let us not be influenced by other cultures and try to think the lawyers are going to help us. We have never changed facts. They tell you they are going to change facts. They will never tell you that these cold facts have warm bodies,” he said.
Heaven knows what he was trying to say, but now the presidency says this was not correct. In a statement Zuma says reports on his speech on the Traditional Courts Bill to the National House of Traditional Leaders in Cape Town have been “sensationalised by some newspapers to the point of being grossly misleading”.
Presidential spokesperson Mac Maharaj said media reports indicated that the President had wholeheartedly supported the Bill. They further “deliberately left out his acknowledgements of the shortcomings of the Bill which many stakeholders have raised, which have to be addressed”.
Old Mac then goes on ad infinitum, but does not get to the point where he points out what his boss actually did say. So I reckon we will have to stand with the not whites blacks only statement. Maharaj said that in the interest of fairness “we believe that the affected media should carry the adequate and proper correction”, what the hell that my be.
Meanwhile the Centre for Constitutional Rights woke up and said they were concern with the reported comments that South Africa’s justice system was “the white man’s way” for solving “African problems”.
“The Constitution – and justice system established by the Constitution -is not ‘the white man’s way’,” advocate Johan Kruger said in a statement. “The Constitution was freely adopted, as the supreme law in South Africa, by all our people in the Constituent Assembly. Moreover, the justice system is not only subject to the Constitution, but is mandated to uphold the values, rights and principles enshrined in the Constitution.”
Kruger said those values and rights included, among others, equality before the law, access to justice, the right to legal representation and the right not to be punished in a cruel, degrading or inhuman manner.
