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IOL News
2 days ago
- Politics
- IOL News
Minister Gayton McKenzie under scrutiny for social media posts
Sports Minister Gayton McKenzie has denied racism allegations, calling it a political campaign orchestrated by the EFF and various social media influencers. Image: Gayton McKenzie / Facebook Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie, who recently dismissed claims of being a racist, has been given until Wednesday to respond to the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which is investigating his "racially-divisive" social media posts from over a decade ago. On Friday, in a statement, the commission said it has found prima facie evidence that McKenzie's tweets violate the country's equality laws. This comes as McKenzie recently faced a public backlash after some of the posts he made on X, formerly known as Twitter, between 2011 and 2017 resurfaced, sparking a social media frenzy. Last week, ActionSA confirmed it had reported McKenzie to the South African Human Rights Commission for repeatedly using hateful Apartheid-era slurs to degrade and dehumanise black South Africans. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading The SAHRC said it has opened an investigation into the minister's posts following an outcry and complaints from members of the public. "Following the assessments of the contents, the Commission is of the view that utterances made by Minister McKenzie are prima facie violations of the provisions of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (Equality Act), 2000. Consequently, the Commission has sent an allegation letter to Minister McKenzie. "Thererafter, the Commission will determine the best way forward, which may include instituting proceedings in the relevant Equality Court as per Section 13 (3)(b) of the South African Human Rights Commission Act 40 of 2013 (SAHRC Act), read with Section 20 of the Equality Act," the Commission said. Early this month, the leader of the Patriotic Alliance condemned members of the Open Chats podcast who had used derogatory terms in reference to the Coloured community. As a result, social media users began digging through some of McKenzie's old tweets, allegedly filled with racial slurs against black South Africans. However, the minister has denied being a racist in a recent video statement. McKenzie also accused his political opponents of a political campaign to tarnish his image, saying," This is a political campaign. The first thing I want to say is that there must be a victim because racism has a victim. Who is the victim? Who did I ever use the K word to? That is the first thing that they must prove." Professor Tshepo Madlingozi, Associate Professor and the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University said, according to the recent Constitutional Court ruling, the use of the K word is demeaning. "The court has found that the use of the K word is prohibited, and no one has the right to use it, even as a joke or satire. The court has been very clear on the use of the word. When we assessed the posts by Mr McKenzie, we found that even though they were made a long time ago, they violate Section 10 of the Constitution," he said. Attempts to get a comment from McKenzie were unsuccessful at the time of publication. siyabongasithole@
eNCA
10-08-2025
- Politics
- eNCA
ActionSA takes Gayton McKenzie to SAHRC for alleged racial slurs
Sport and Culture minister Gayton McKenzie JOHANNESBURG - ActionSA has reported Sport Minister Gayton McKenzie to the SA Human Rights Commission, for alleged racial remarks. Previous social media comments, reportedly by Mckenzie, have resurfaced. The posts contain several racial slurs. And ActionSA says those remarks serve to degrade and dehumanise black South Africans. Despite laying a complaint with the SAHRC, the party says it has reservations about its ability to deal with the matter. Several other political parties including the EFF and ATM have called for McKenzie's remova 🚫 Racism and the dehumanisation of any person have no place in South Africa! We have reported Minister Gayton McKenzie to the South African Human Rights Commission for repeatedly using hateful Apartheid-era slurs to degrade and dehumanise black South Africans. — ActionSA (@Action4SA) August 9, 2025
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Simon Mann, mercenary who was jailed for leading an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea
Simon Mann, who has died aged 72, was an Old Etonian, former SAS officer and soldier of fortune who made millions from providing mercenaries to protect diamond mines and oil refineries in Africa; in 2004, however, he bit off more than he could chew when he became involved in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. The plot went disastrously wrong when Mann and 67 fellow 'mercenaries' – mostly old sweats from Apartheid-era South Africa's bush wars – were arrested by Zimbabwean security forces at Harare Airport, where they had touched down in order to take on a consignment of arms. Mann claimed that they were on their way to protect diamond interests in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. But they were accused of setting out to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's tyrannical president Teodoro Obiang Nguema. The story of the alleged coup contained more implausible characters and plot twists than an airport paperback thriller. There was an African dictator who allegedly enjoyed feasting on human testicles, there was the promise of liquid gold – offshore oil reserves that promised to make millions for those daring enough to seize them; there were walk-on roles for mercenaries, business tycoons, the disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer, exiled politicians and Baroness Thatcher's son, Mark. At the centre of everything was Mann, maverick scion of the Watney's brewing empire who seemed to be a throwback to the days of Cecil Rhodes, when white buccaneers toppled governments and ran private fiefdoms. The adventures on which Mann embarked would lead him, eventually, to a foetid cell in Harare's notorious Chikurubi prison, from which he was extradited in secret in February 2008 to Equatorial Guinea, where he was incarcerated in the infamous Black Beach jail. In November 2009 President Obiang granted Mann a complete pardon on humanitarian grounds. Simon Mann was born on June 26 1952. His father, George Mann, was a former Guards officer who captained the England cricket team on their 1948-49 tour of the Cape (Simon's grandfather had also been England cricket captain). Described by the cricketer's bible Wisden as a 'forceful batsman, prone to hitting hard', he later became chairman of Watney's, the brewing giant. Simon followed his father and grandfather to Eton, where he bucked the family trend by preferring rowing to cricket and, according to one friend, was always planning African coups at the back of the class; he was always known as 'Maps Mann' because he always had maps in his hand. Lacking academic ability, he sought an outlet for his daredevil instincts in the Army. After training as an officer at Sandhurst he took a commission in the Scots Guards and did a three-year stint as a troop commander in G Squadron of 22 SAS. Returning to the regular Army, he completed a tour of Northern Ireland and had postings in Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Canada and central America. In the mid-1980s Mann left the army to go into 'business', the precise nature of which remained a mystery even to some of his closest relatives. After a stint selling computer software he moved into the 'security' business, providing bodyguards to wealthy Arabs to protect their Scottish estates from poachers, before briefly getting back into uniform in 1990 to serve on British Gulf war commander Sir Peter de la Billière's staff in Riyadh. In 1993 he set up Executive Outcomes with the entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. A mercenary outfit, it made a fortune protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola's civil war and training Angolan government troops. Two years later he established an offshoot, Sandline International, with a fellow former Guardsman, Lt-Col Tim Spicer, and shipped arms to Sierra Leone in apparent contravention of a UN embargo. With an estimated £10 million in the bank, Mann bought Inchmery, a former residence of the Rothschild family on the banks of the river Beaulieu in Hampshire, together with a Cape Dutch gabled house in Constantia, a secluded suburb of Cape Town whose inhabitants at one time included Earl Spencer and Sir Mark Thatcher. There, he and his third wife, Amanda, became well-known figures on the Cape social scene. As well as meeting Baroness Thatcher at a party thrown by Mark, in a rare foray into the public domain Mann agreed to play the part of Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the paratroopers who fired on marchers in Derry, in a 2001 television reconstruction of Bloody Sunday. The story of the alleged coup plot emerged from 'confessions' made in prison by Mann and his alleged co-conspirator Nick du Toit, a former South African special officer and member of Executive Outcomes, who had been arrested a day after Mann in the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo. In his testimony Mann said that he had been approached in 2003 by the Chelsea-based Lebanese oil tycoon, Ely Calil, who had made his fortune trading oil in Nigeria and was a friend of Severo Moto Nsá, self-styled president of the Equatorial Guinea government-in-exile. Moto had long sought the overthrow of President Obiang, and at a subsequent secret meeting in Spain the three men allegedly hatched a plot to bring about the tyrant's downfall. It was claimed that the three men struck a deal under which Calil and Mann would arrange to put Moto in power in return for a lump-sum payment of $16 million. Mann would also get the rights to supply Guinea's future security needs and Calil would become the country's chief oil broker. With the deal concluded, Mann and Calil were alleged to have set about raising the money needed to pay for the operation. The basic deal was that 10 investors would each contribute £100,000. In return they would share £15 million between them on the coup's completion, with the hope of further dividends as the oil began to flow. Du Toit was tasked with recruiting the 80 or so mercenaries needed and, from these, he would take a small advance guard to Guinea in the guise of being involved in a tourist business. Once they were installed, Mann would fly in under cover of darkness with the rest of the men. The president would be seized in his bed and Moto installed. All began according to the alleged plan, and on March 7, with du Toit in Malabo, 64 mercenaries boarded an old Boeing 727 which Mann had bought for $400,000, and took off for Harare from Wonderboom airport near Pretoria. When the aircraft touched down at Harare airport, it taxied to the military sector, where those on board were expecting to link up with Mann and pick up their weaponry. Instead, Mann, the three flight crew and all 64 mercenaries on board were arrested and their weapons seized. The next day, du Toit and his 14-strong group were arrested in Malabo. All those named by Mann and du Toit in their testimonies denied any involvement in the plot and claimed that the men had been tortured to make false statements, and Mann later claimed that his initial statements had been made under duress. Relatives of those arrested in Harare maintained that they had been on their way to Congo to guard diamond mines. It was noted that the small-scale and rather amateurish nature of the operation hardly suggested planning for a military coup. But other evidence seemed to lend weight to the coup-plot theory. A South African telecoms tycoon, Gianfranco Cicogna, recalled being approached by Mann to invest $120,000 in a 'project' in Equatorial Guinea (he declined). Documentary evidence from one of Mann's offshore companies, Logo Logistics, showed that a person by the name of JH Archer transferred £74,000 to the company just four days before the alleged coup attempt. 'JH' are the initials of Lord Archer, a friend of Ely Calil. Archer's lawyers denied that he had sent money and both he and Calil denied knowing of any coup plot. The biggest fish to become entangled in the scandal was Baroness Thatcher's son, Mark, who was alleged to have paid for a helicopter to fly Moto into Guinea on the night of the coup. His name entered the fray after an explosive but hilarious letter from Mann to his wife was intercepted by prison guards. In the letter, written shortly after his arrest, Mann asked her to elicit the help of chums on the alleged plot's 'wonga list' of financial supporters: 'Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT,' Mann wrote. 'They [the lawyers] get no reply from Smelly [thought to be Ely Calil] and Scratcher [the nickname Mann used for Thatcher, on account of the acne he suffered while at school]...' But Mann then went on to suggest that Scratcher's involvement amounted to more than using his contacts to lobby for their release. 'It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga!' he wrote. 'Of course investors did not think this would happen. Do they think they can be part of something like this with only upside potential – no hardship or risk of this going wrong? Anyone and everyone in this is in it – good times or bad. Now it's bad times and everyone has to f---ing well pull their full weight… Once we get into a real trial scenario we are f---ed.' He ended the letter with the words: 'Anyway [another contact] was expecting project funds inwards to Logo from Scratcher… If there is not enough, then present investors must come up with more.' On July 22 2004 Mann was convicted in Zimbabwe on two counts of attempting to buy firearms illegally. He was sentenced to seven years, later reduced to four. Sir Mark Thatcher was arrested in August 2004 and given a four-year suspended prison term and a hefty fine after pleading guilty to breaking anti-mercenary legislation in South Africa by agreeing to finance the chartering of a helicopter, though he denied knowledge of the coup plot and maintained that his involvement had been unwitting. Kept in solitary confinement at his own request, Mann was said to have endured torture and privation. In April 2007 he was said to be suffering multiple organ failure and to be suffering from a life-threatening intestinal condition caused by poor diet. Hopes that the Zimbabwean courts would turn down any request for his extradition to Equatorial Guinea were dashed in May 2007 when, shortly after his release from jail, he was rearrested following a decision by a Harare court to reject defence arguments that he would not be given a fair trial in Guinea and was likely to be tortured. After his extradition, in March 2008 he was allowed, or possibly encouraged, to give an interview to Channel 4 News in which he again fingered Ely Calil as the mastermind behind the 'f***-up', said that Sir Mark Thatcher was 'part of the team' but dismissed suggestions that Lord Archer or Peter Mandelson were involved. Urbane, charming and apparently relaxed, despite the shackles and years of solitary confinement, Mann claimed not to have been put under pressure by the Equatorial Guinea authorities, though there were suspicions that he might have agreed to 'spill the beans' in return for being spared the death penalty. Simon Mann was married three times. His first two marriages were dissolved and he married thirdly, in 1995, Amanda Freedman, with whom he had four children. They survive him with three children of his earlier marriages. Simon Mann, born June 26 1952, death announced May 9 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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The South African
08-05-2025
- General
- The South African
Inside an archive: Family ‘surprises', earthquakes and land claims
National Archives Awareness Week is currently underway from 5 to 9 May. As the Western Cape Archives and Records Service runs workshops to teach members of the public about the repository, we explore what exactly can be found out by digging into history. The Western Cape Archives and Records Service is South Africa's oldest such service. It contains some of South Africa's earliest written records, starting from 1651. This week, the institution is running a daily programme, focused on digitalisation, to encourage South Africans to make good use of the documents. There are various events online and in-person in Cape Town. The week culminates with a free Family History Workshop for beginners in central Cape Town on Friday. According to Helen Joannides, an archivist in the Public Programmes and Outreach Division of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service, the institution has made important contributions to South African families. She told The South African: 'The archives have been used by many families to delve into their family history so you can imagine the surprises there.' Indeed, social media platforms like Reddit are full of stories of South Africans discovering secret family members. Comment by from discussion inGenealogy Joannides adds: 'Archival records are also legal proof so they have been used for successful land claims.' For example, Joannides describes how renters, who had lived in District Six prior to the Apartheid-era forced removals, used an archival document to prove they had been residents in the area and to successfully institute a compensation claim. The document was a register from a hospital which recorded the addresses of patients. Archives are also used to research historic earthquakes. This data helps scientists better prepare for future earthquakes. Interested persons can sign up on the Western Cape Archives and Records Service website. The family history workshop will be repeated later in the year. South Africans can also visit the archives at 72 Roeland Street, Cape Town from 08:00 to 16:00 from Monday to Friday, and from 08:00 to 14:00 on the first and third Saturday of the month. Let us know by leaving a comment below or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 0211. Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X, and Bluesky for the latest news.
Time of India
04-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Elon Musk calls Nazi accusations ‘outrageous,' says media engaged in character assassination: 'I'm difficult to kill, so ...'
Elon Musk , head of Donald Trump 's Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ), lashed out at media critics and denied allegations of white supremacist sympathies in a Fox News interview released Friday. 'It's an outrageous thing to claim that I'm a Nazi,' Musk said, suggesting that if his detractors could 'press a button' to kill him, 'they would.' But, he added, 'since I'm a little difficult to kill, they are doing character assassination instead.' Musk's comments follow months of growing criticism. At Trump's post-inauguration rally, he delivered a straight-arm salute interpreted by many, including his estranged daughter, as a Sieg Heil. His actions since purchasing Twitter, X now, have further intensified scrutiny. — cb_doge (@cb_doge) Musk restored previously banned white supremacist accounts, and in March, during sweeping federal layoffs under DOGE, he shared a post implying that dictators like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao didn't kill millions—'public workers did.' After backlash, he deleted the post. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 2025 Top Trending local enterprise accounting software [Click Here] Esseps Learn More Undo Shortly after the inauguration, Musk also addressed a campaign event for Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, warning Germans against losing their culture to 'multiculturalism.' 'Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,' he said at the time. Speaking to Lara Trump, the former president's daughter-in-law and Fox News host, Musk said the 'relentless propaganda campaign' against him mirrors the treatment of Donald Trump. 'They've also called President Trump a Nazi… but he also is not a violent person, and, in fact, has done a lot to prevent wars,' Musk said. 'That's the very opposite of being a Nazi.' Lara Trump sympathized with Musk, referencing his childhood in Apartheid-era South Africa. 'I'm sure you've seen a lot of horrific things,' she said. 'To be called a Nazi… that must be really hard for you.' Musk, in turn, blamed media manipulation: 'If you repeat a lie—'he's a Nazi'—enough times, some people actually believe it… especially people that still believe the legacy news.' He cited CNN specifically, criticizing the outlet but exempting conservative commentator Scott Jennings. In January, Musk's mother encouraged him on X to sue CNN after Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell challenged Jennings on air about Musk's gesture. 'Why don't you do it on TV right now if you think it's so banal?' Rampell asked. Jennings declined. As Musk faces increased unpopularity amid drastic government downsizing, DOGE policies have led to protests, vandalism, and arson at Tesla dealerships. His critics have dubbed Tesla vehicles 'swasticars.' In March, Musk revealed he and his DOGE team receive daily death threats. Still, he remains defiant. 'I've not harmed anyone in my life,' Musk said. 'But it is disappointing how well propaganda works.'
