EFF WELCOMES THE JUDGEMENT BY THE JOHANNESBURG HIGH COURT, WHICH FOUND THAT KENNY KUNENE COMMITTED HATE SPEECH BY REFERRING TO CIC JULIUS MALEMA AS A "COCKROACH"

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) welcomes the correct and logical finding by the Johannesburg High Court, which found the comments made by Kenny Kunene in relation to the Commander in Chief and President of the EFF Julius Malema were hateful and dehumanizing.

In an interview with Thulasizwe Simelane on the 18th of November 2021, Kunene went on a baseless and hateful tirade, in which he referred to the CIC Julius Malema as a "frog" and a "cockroach" that he would supposedly deal with. These comments were not only hateful but were not considerate of the historical impact of derogatory terms used to refer to human beings, in inciting violence and genocide.

Genocides and hate crimes against fellow human beings begin at the point of dehumanization.

When Adolf Hitler rationalized the genocide against the Jewish community, he referred to them as rats. When colonizers sought to pillage, enslave, rape and exploit African people, the rationale behind it was that Africans were a people without history, and were barbarians whose conquest was justified in order to invite them into humanity.

During the Rwandan genocide, when the Hutu's massacred the Tutsi's, the Tutsi's were referred to as cockroaches on national radios and places of public discourse. Kunene was therefore not only hateful, but he was completely ignorant of the deep history that dehumanization has in the pre-emptive stages of violence and genocide.

The Johannesburg High Court therefore correctly found that there was no retaliatory justification for his comments, and that Kunene sought to incite hate and harm towards the Commander In Chief of the EFF.

The EFF hopes that this judgement will serve the rehabilitating purpose that the prison system has clearly failed to achieve with Kunene as an individual. The comments made by Kunene clearly reveal the inadequacies of our Correctional Services system in rehabilitating individuals who are prone to criminality.

Kunene is a case study for the failures of the Correctional Services system, and we hope this corrective judgement will assist him become a semblance of a respectable member of society.

Statement issued by the EFF, 31 January 2023