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Radical Muslim cleric and 3 others gunned down in Kenyan port city

Gunmen opened fire on a car in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, killing four people, including a radical Muslim cleric, a media report said Friday.

The cleric, Sheikh Ibrahim Ismail, was seen as the successor to Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a radical preacher who was gunned down in August last year, sparking unrest in Mombasa, including attacks on churches.

Rogo was on US and UN sanctions lists for his alleged links to the Somali militant group al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda.

The Nation newspaper quoted police as saying Ismail and four others were traveling in a car from mosque on Thursday evening when the incident took place. Only one passenger survived the attack.

Al-Shabaab claimed last month’s attack on the Westgate shopping centre, which left at least 72 people dead, including 61 civilians, six soldiers and five assailants.

Investigations into the attack are ongoing. – dpa

Foreign journalists’ vehicle towed away from Mandela home

Nelson Mandela's houe in Houghton, Johannesburg — Nelson Mandela’s house in Houghton, Johannesburg

A car belonging to foreign media observing the house of former president Nelson Mandela was towed away for having caused an obstruction in Houghton on Thursday night, Johannesburg metro police said.

Spokesman Chief Superintendent Wayne Minnaar said the Toyota Quantum was towed away for obstruction from 12th Avenue and 4th Street after complaints of a disturbance in the Houghton area.

“Another three minibuses, a double cab and a Toyota Cruiser were left on the pavement in the residential area,” he said.

“The cars are used by foreign journalists who were observing the residence of former president Nelson Mandela. It is important that journalists respect the privacy of other individuals.”

On September 25, President Jacob Zuma said Mandela was responding to treatment while convalescing at his Houghton home.

“Our revered former president continues to respond to treatment at his home,” Zuma said in a speech prepared for delivery at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Mandela was admitted to the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria on June 8, with a recurring lung infection and was discharged on September 1. – Sapa

Former rugby player jailed for fraud

A rugby player for the former Northern-Transvaal rugby team, Paul Botes, was on Thursday sentenced in the Specialised Commercial Crimes Court in Pretoria to serve 10 years in jail for fraud, Beeld reported.

Botes, 51, reached a guilty plea agreement with the State on 12 charges of theft and one of money laundering after stealing about R19.5 million from investors.

He stole the money between 1993 and 2012 while he worked as a broker.

He was first arrested in 2012 at his home in Pretoria, after an investor registered a complaint with the serious economic offences unit of police unit the Hawks.

Botes admitted to having received money from investors, some of whom were elderly, which he then used to fund his own lifestyle. – Sapa

Three Xhosas arrested for stock theft

Three people were arrested when they were found in possession of livestock in Ngangelizwe, Mthatha, on Thursday, Eastern Cape police said.

The three men, aged between 25 and 30, were arrested in different places and one of them was found in possession of two cows suspected to have been stolen, ” said Lt-Col Mzukisi Fatyela on Friday.

On searching the home of the third man — a traditional healer — police recovered a 9mm pistol and ammunition.

The livestock was reported stolen from Lwandlana village at the Mthatha police station.

They will appear in the Mthatha Magistrate’s Court on Monday. – Sapa

Black man arrested for raping his 8-year old niece

An Eastern Cape man has been arrested for allegedly raping his eight-year-old niece in Gungululu, Tsolo, on Thursday, police said.

“The man, 48, called his niece to his house pretending that he wanted to give her and her friends meat. He then chased out the other children and then raped his niece,” said police spokesman Lt-Col Mzukisi Fatyela on Friday.

“The girl’s mother noticed that she was in pain and on enquiring, the child told her about what happened.”

The man was arrested by police around 7pm after the girl’s mother reported the matter to the police, Fatyela said.

He will appear in the Tsolo Magistrate’s Court on Monday. – Sapa

Man raped his step-daughter ‘to heal her’

A 60-year-old man has been jailed for life by the Pietermaritzburg Regional Court for raping his teenaged step-daughter, KwaZulu-Natal police said on Wednesday.

The man was sentenced on Tuesday for raping his daughter for eight years, said Colonel Jay Naicker.

The daughter was 16-years-old when he started raping her in 2004.

The man told the then sick teenager to sleep with him so she could be healed.

She was too afraid to report the matter to her family because he threatened to kill her if she did, said Naicker.

The girl eventually reported the rape in 2011.

KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Mmamonnye Ngobeni said crimes against women and children remained a priority for the police.

“This conviction gives hope to those that are abused,” he said. – Sapa

Eastern Cape black stabs his wife to death

A man was arrested in King William’s Town on Thursday following the murder of his wife, Eastern Cape police said.

The 44-year-old was caught in Buffalo Street after police received a tip-off, Lieutenant Siphokazi Mawisa said.

He allegedly stabbed his 37-year-old wife to death in their home in Motherwell, Port Elizabeth, on Tuesday, and fled to King William’s Town.

He was expected to appear in the Motherwell Magistrate’s Court on Monday. – Sapa

Farm murder in Eastern Transvaal

A farmer was shot dead near Sabie, Mpumalanga (Eastern Transvaal), on Thursday morning, police said.

Four armed men accosted Paul Madison, 63, and his wife, Gwyneth Madison, 58, when they returned to their home on the farm Kruisfontein, Colonel Leonard Hlathi told a Sapa correspondent.

“The wife was tied up and placed in the house. They took the husband outside and the wife heard three gunshots. She managed to untie herself and called for help,” said Hlathi.

Minutes later, the police and a private security company arrived to find Madison dead.

The farm’s gardener was found tied up and was thrown into a pit toilet. He was saved. The robbers took two laptops, bank cards, four cellphones, jewellery, cash, and several guns.

“We are now investigating cases of murder, armed robbery, and attempted murder,” said Hlathi.

Asked whether the police were linking the attack to that in Hazyview after midnight on Thursday, Hlathi said nothing could be ruled out.

“We cannot deny or confirm. Our investigations are underway in both cases and we cannot reveal the details at the moment,” he said.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, three masked men armed with a shotgun and two pistols reportedly robbed 108 pupils and 10 teachers, from Laerskool Hennopspark in Centurion, Gauteng.

The children, who represent their school choir, were staying at the Aan de Vliet Resort and Guest House outside Hazyview. Hlathi said three of the teachers were robbed.

“The robbers took cellphones, cash, a laptop, and an iPad. After robbing them, the unknown men ran away and police were called. We are now investigating,” said Hlathi.

South African police ‘abuse sex workers’

Of 80 sex workers based in Johannesburg, 52 (65 percent) had been abused by police, the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre (TLAC) said on Thursday.

“The most common forms of abuse experienced by sex workers are emotional violence such as swearing, insults, spitting, and being chased away, at least one incident of physical abuse, and unlawful arrests,” the TLAC said in a statement, citing a recent study of 80 street-based sex workers.

Sixteen percent of the sex workers surveyed indicated they had experienced physical abuse, and a further five percent experienced sexual assaults from police officers.

Such treatment went against the police’s code of ethics. Although their role was to serve and protect, many police officers acted unlawfully.

“Engagements with the police have shown that some officers struggle to execute their roles due to the difficult nature of policing sex work,” the centre said.

“As a result they are forced to utilise municipal by-laws of loitering to arrest sex workers and remove them from their places of work.”

Of the 80 sex workers, 12 (15 percent) said they had been arrested, with 10 percent stating they were held in holding cells without appearing in court.

“Where we have assisted sex workers to lay charges against errant police, all these cases never proceeded to court because of sex workers’ fear of harassment and intimidation from police,” the centre said.

It would also have a negative impact on their ability to make a living.

The study found sex workers continued to be vulnerable to abuse from both police and clients, which limited their human rights and affected their income.

This in turn prevented them from accessing services such as health care, social and legal services.

“A legal opinion obtained shows that using loitering by-laws to ‘police’ sex workers is illegal and open to various legal challenges,” the TLAC said.

“The findings of the research study, conducted with Sisonke, the sex worker’s rights movement, once again proves why decriminalisation of adult sex work is necessary.”

It would compel police to focus on serious crime, and support sex workers to realise their rights to safety and security, dignity, and other critical services.

Police were not immediately available for comment. – Sapa

Bantu imperialism

by Dan Roodt

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I was still pondering the implications of “black colonialism” as set out in a previous column when it struck me that some of South Africa’s ethnic categories are completely wrong.

Afrikaners were the first group in the country to refer to themselves as “Africans”, as long ago as 1707 when Hendrik Biebouw said: “Ik ben een Afrikaander.” However, today Afrikaners have been defined as an out-group by South African legislation that simply classes them as “whites”.

Most of our affirmative-action legislation has been imported from the USA and BEE is just an adapted form of what is called “minority procurement” over there. So there is nothing “African” about the current race-classification system!

In German, “Afrikaner” means simply “African”, yet the current laws define Afrikaners as Europeans. The ultimate irony is that ANC and especially SACP ideology has been constructed by recent immigrants from Lithuania (like Joe Slovo) and, of course, Britain.

Imposing racial quotas on everything from the medical schools at Afrikaans universities to the Blue Bulls rugby team is bad enough. But stripping us of our age-old Africanness by legislative fiat represents the ultimate insult, making us interlopers in our own country.

Searching for answers, I reread Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech, but it is simply a fanciful restatement of American multiculturalism, with echoes of (Swedish) Gunnar Myrdal’s “melting pot” idea. So nothing “African” there, either.

We urgently need to bring back the term “Bantu” and I have begun to recommend its use on social media and everywhere else. There seems to be a certain squeamishness about using this word, meaning “people”, which is unfathomable. Even the famous Xhosa definition of “ubuntu” contains it: “Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu.”

Anthropologists, linguists and other people in need of proper definitions have never stopped referring to the “Bantu peoples”, “Bantu languages”, etc. Even Bantu education has been rehabilitated by such leading authorities as Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and a lecturer at Wits Business School, Mr. Rabelani Dagada, both of whom consider it better than the current schooling system.

The first ANC-supporting newspaper in the 1920s was called Abanthu-Batho and today there is a clothing brand which is thus advertised: “Abantu is a ladies wear brand which creates timeless pieces which speak to the South African audience.”

The Bantu peoples inhabit East and Southern Africa. For them or their Lithuanian theorists to arrogate unto themselves the sole right to being called “Africans” is not only intellectually unsound, but also unfair. After all, there are 200 million North Africans, including Egyptians, Arabs, Berbers, Copts and so on, who are Africans, by definition. West Africa too, is given the cold shoulder by Bantu imperialism.

In the nineteen-twenties some leading German and French anthropologists claimed, upon the basis of very ancient mining activity in these parts, that whites may have inhabited both South Africa and Zimbabwe as long ago as 3500 B.C. They must have been the first Afrikaners and we should venerate them as our true founding fathers, together with the Khoi and San.

Either we must qualify for affirmative action like other “Africans” – and even the Chinese! – or the Bantu must clearly announce their pretensions to being a kind of continental nobility with special privileges.

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This column also appeared as a letter in Business Day.

The warmongers: not looking out for us

by Ilana Mercer

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To listen to U.S. government officials there is only an upside to the punitive sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and a reluctant European Union. Consequently, the emphasis is forever on how to toughen the punishment; never on whether to lift economic sanctions on the long-suffering people of Iran.

But what about the effects of trade boycotts on American businesses?

Chris Harmer of The Institute for the Study of War estimates that the Boeing Company alone forfeits a minimum of $25 billion in business every year because of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran, a niche market that is filled by the Russians. Overall, Harmer puts the value to U.S. business of trade lost due to the economic embargo on Iran at approximately $50 billion per annum.

For example, Iran imports $1.5 billion worth of cars a year, the beneficiaries of which are companies like Nissan, Toyota and Peugeot (when they might have been General Motors and Chrysler). Peugeot does an added half a billion dollars’ worth of commerce with Iran just in car parts.

The Iranian economy, moreover, has diversified and is adapting to life without the U.S. The rest of the world—pockets in Europe and most of Asia—has not isolated Iran, with the result that the country has many trading partners other than the U.S. And while Iran has lost petroleum revenue due to sanctions, the trend will not endure. China, Japan and South Korea are hungry for the country’s crude.

Not to be overlooked are the costs to Americans of sanction enforcement, avers Harmer. In addition to the opportunity costs—the missed business aforementioned—there are “direct costs.” The Office of Foreign Asset Control in the U.S. Treasury Department squanders around $1 billion a year in developing lists of “financial institutions that are subject to sanctions,” and then infringing on the rights of individuals and companies to freely exchange privately owned property.

“Indirect costs” are incurred in the course of cultivating a massive U.S. intelligent infrastructure—a veritable alphabet soup of agencies—upon which the Treasury draws in enforcing a regimen of sanctions.

So, too, are the “deterrent costs” borne by the American taxpayer who pays for patrolling the Persian Gulf, the Northern Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

Ultimately, trade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war with Iran. The more economically intertwined countries become, the less likely they are to go to war. More than boycotts, barter with Iran is bound to promote goodwill and reduce belligerence on both sides.

As a general rule, state-enforced boycotts harm honest, hard-working Americans who use the economic means to earn their keep. They benefit servants of Uncle Sam—the political class and its media and think-tank hangers-on. For they deploy the political means to advance their ends and grow their sphere of influence. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory.

As always, it’s us against them: the state versus the people who labor outside it and in spite of it.

For now, Obama’s eager response to Iranian overtures has sidelined Syria. Before Syria recedes in memory—to be replaced by demands for action against Iran—it’s worth considering one constant quantity: the media guttersnipes and their motivation.

The bobbingheads of TV have been complaining in the most unctuous terms that Russia and Syria have pulled one over us. The U.S., they lament, has been weakened, evidently, because someone halted the momentum of war.

You see, the chattering and political classes cannot conceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus and depend on it for status and income.

Conversely, individual Americans—who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from war—should never conflate their interests with those of the government and its emissaries, who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war.

More than anyone, who benefits when America goes to war? Those who “function within the nimbus of great power” in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

Thus did Charles Krauthammer ridiculously equate the failure to go to war against Syria with “Russia supplanting America as regional hegemon.”

Krauthammer was joined by others, not least of them Bill O’Reilly and his sidekick Dennis the Menace. How diminished will the bluster of both media mouths be if the U.S. is no longer dictating the terms of war (lots of it) and peace (too little of it) in the world? Their immense egos will suffer. Maybe even their incomes, eventually.

But not you, the everyday American.

Putin stopped a war in Syria. This is not the same as “supplanting” American power. Rather, the Russians replaced bully power with a balance of power, and this is good for ordinary Americans.

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war. The proof is in the Putin.

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Concourt places Rivonia Primary’s admissions under state control

The education department has the power to override a school’s admission policy, the Constitutional Court found on Thursday.

It upheld, in part, an appeal against a judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), holding that the head of the education department in Gauteng had the power to admit a pupil in excess of Rivonia Primary School’s admission policy.

The matter came before the Constitutional Court after a Grade One pupil was refused a place at the Johannesburg school for the 2011 academic year, and placed on a waiting list.

The child’s mother lodged a complaint with authorities, and the head of department in Gauteng instructed that the child be admitted.

The school brought an application in the High Court in Johannesburg, seeking a declaration that it had the power to set admission policy, and admit pupils in accordance with that policy. The court dismissed the application.

The school then approached the SCA, which held that the department did not have the power to override the school’s admission policy. The matter was then escalated to the Constitutional Court.

On Thursday, the court’s majority judgment was that the head of department had the power to admit the pupil.

The Constitutional Court granted leave to appeal, and set aside and replaced the SCA’s order.

“It is declared that the head of department of education in the province of Gauteng was empowered to issue an instruction to the principal of Rivonia Primary School to admit the learner in excess of the limit in its admission policy.”

However, the court found that in exercising its power to instruct a principal of a public school to admit a pupil, the department had to act in a procedurally fair manner.

“It is declared that the head of department of education in the province of Gauteng did not act in a procedurally fair manner when he issued instructions to the principal of Rivonia Primary School to admit the learner and when he placed the learner in the school.”

In an explanatory statement issued after the judgment, the court said a school governing body’s power to determine capacity as part of its admission policy was subject to other provisions of the Schools Act, including that the department maintained “ultimate control over the implementation of admissions decisions”.

Further, provincial regulations afforded the head of department the power to overturn a principal’s rejection of a pupil’s application for admission. – Sapa

Taxi owners shot dead in Diepsloot

Two men were shot dead at the Diepsloot taxi rank on Wednesday night, Gauteng police said.

The two men, believed to be taxi owners, were sitting in a taxi when two gunmen approached them and opened fire, Lt-Col Katlego Mogale said on Thursday.

“At this stage the motive for the killings is not known and investigations are ongoing.”

The two men were declared dead at the scene. Mogale could not confirm if the killings were directly related to conflict in the taxi industry.

Police task force subdue hostage takers

The four Mangaung prison inmates who held a woman hostage were successfully overpowered by a special police task force, national police commissioner Riah Phiyega announced on Thursday.

The woman, an official of G4S which manages the Mangaung prison, was rescued just after 10pm on Wednesday when the task force entered the cell occupied by the hostage-takers and their victim.

“Ultimately, at 10.16 pm last night, a tactical assault on the area where the hostage-takers had barricaded themselves was conducted by members of the elite Special Task Force,” said Phiyega.

Police said no shots were fired during the operation and the hostage, who was held for 13 hours, did not sustain any injuries during the rescue operation.

“We can confirm that the hostage [situation] at Mangaung Correctional Centre has been concluded,” G4S Africa head Andy Baker said in a separate statement.

Local police said the woman was unharmed but was nevertheless referred to Rosepark Hospital for a medical check up and treatment.

“We are extremely pleased to report that our employee was not physically harmed… and is receiving care and counselling support,” Baker said.

Free State police spokesman Brigadier Billy Jones said the four inmates were arrested and would be charged with kidnapping and attempted murder of two G4S workers, who were injured earlier on Wednesday.

Jones said that after the woman was accosted and overpowered by the four inmates, they dragged her into one of the cells and locked themselves in.

In the process two male employees, who tried to rescue their colleague were stabbed in the arms and legs by the hostage-takers.

They were apparently armed with sharp objects, believed to be scissor parts.

Jones said the two prison officials were treated at the scene and were reported not to be in a serious condition.

The hostage-takers were serving time for rape, murder and robbery.

Phiyega said in the eventual rescue the task force members acted in accordance with their training and used minimum force to rescue the woman.

She thanked all police officers involved in the peaceful resolution of the hostage situation. – Sapa