Johannesburg- Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi has gone to court to teach the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group co-founder and director Daniel Francois Roodt about the rule of law.
Lesufi has applied in the Joburg High Court for an order to force Roodt to apologize for calling him a racist and alien.
Roodt attacked Lesufi in 2019, apparently, after the Gauteng ANC deputy provincial chairperson took to Twitter and said the names such as Hoerskool Hendrik Verwoerd in Tshwane would continue to fall until there were no names reminding South Africans of the painful colonial and apartheid past.
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In the papers that Sunday World has seen, Lesufi said Roodt wrote he had read the apartheid architect’s speeches and did not slight any racial or language group in South Africa.
“Yet Lesufi makes racist statements about Afrikaans and Afrikaners. What right does this racist have to remove Verwoerd’s name from anything? Lesufi isn’t even South African,” he tweeted.
Lesufi said the statements, which attracted in excess of 600 comments, 500 likes and was shared 180 times and seen by 330 000 people from Roodt’s account, which has 41 000 followers, were defamatory and false.
He said the statements were understood by ordinary South African citizens to mean that he is a racist who makes racist statements about Afrikaans and Afrikaners and discriminates on the basis of race.
He said Roodt’s statements were also understood to mean that he was a fraud and a liar because he “is not even a South African”. They were also, he added, understood to mean that he was a racist who hated Afrikaans and the Afrikaners’ traditional culture.
Lesufi said at no point did he make racist statements or remarks about Afrikaans and Afrikaners, and did not harbor hatred towards the Afrikaans language or culture. He said upon learning of Roodt’s ‘injurious” statements, he informed his lawyers, who wrote a letter to him on August 8, 2019, demanding that he apologize and retract them.
But Roodt, said Lesufi, wrote back to him on August 23, 2019, and steadfastly refused to apologize to him and retract his utterances. Lesufi said as result, he had suffered damages amounting to the sum of R410 000.
“Wherefore the plaintiff prays for judgment against the defendant for payment of an amount of R415 000, the removal of the defamatory statements from the defendant’s Twitter account and an apology for the defamatory statements on the same Twitter account and cost of the suit,” read the papers.
Lesufi declined to comment and said the matter was sub judice.
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