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Legalbrief   |   your legal news hub Friday 29 March 2024

Quotes

 ‘They want you to categorise the law enforcement agencies, and by extension the court system, as unreliable, incompetent and whatever unfortunate words were used. The moment you do that, you might as well give up the commission now, because you can never refer matters that require further action to those very law enforcement agencies. It becomes absurd.'

– Advocate Azhar Bham SC arguing against a request from the Guptas to testify in the commission of inquiry into state capture from Dubai via video link. He said it would inevitably validate their criticism of local law enforcement as unreliable and incompetent.

 

‘I am the only one still alive among those who participated in the Mauritius constitutional conference at Lancaster House (in London) in 1965, where talks on the ultimate status of Mauritius were held. Those talks resulted in the unlawful detachment of an integral part of our territory on the eve of our independence.'

– Mauritius’ Defence Minister Sir Anerood Jugnauth at the International Court of Justice on the Chagos Islands territorial dispute

 

 ‘There is no need to change the Constitution in terms of law.’

– Professor Ruth Hall of the University of the Western Cape's Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies in her submissions on amending section 25 of the Constitution to allow for expropriation of land without compensation. The consensus among the academics who presented was that it is the government's inability to carry out land reform that was to blame for the continuing inequality in South Africa's pattern of land ownership, rather than the Constitution.

 

‘The fact that I was born in a different country and have different-coloured skin became part of the labelling process. It was no longer Kweku Adoboli who went to Yorkshire at the age of 12, became head boy of his school, went to Nottingham University, contributed to the students' union, became campus brand ambassador for UBS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

– Ghanaian national Kweku Adoboli, a former trader convicted of fraud in 2012, who is facing deportation from the UK after being convicted of fraud

 

'The sick joke is that it was this President, steered by three crooked brothers who had robbed the state coffers of hundreds and hundreds of billions of rand, who then came up with "radical economic transformation" as a demand for the immediate emancipation of black citizens and identified "white monopoly capital" as their enemy. The naked truth is that nine years of Zuma ended in South Africa being poorer, more unequal and more polarised than when he took office. Land reform came to a virtual standstill, and those farmers who were given land were abandoned by the state and most of them failed. State institutions were hollowed out or simply taken over. The very fabric of our society was shred badly.'

– Analyst Max du Preez on former President Jacob Zuma