GOOD Statement by Brett Herron ,
GOOD Secretary General
6 December 2024
The news of the deportation of Chris Hani’s murderer Janusz Waluś is welcome. Having been released on parole two years ago, there was no benefit to South Africa in prolonging his stay in the country.
That Waluś and the late South African right-wing leader Clive Derby-Lewis were responsible for murdering Hani was found by the courts to be beyond doubt.
What has always been in doubt is their story that they acted alone. When they applied for amnesty to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they did not implicate anyone else, and their applications were declined on the technical basis that they were not acting on higher orders.
Announcing the deportation today, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshaveni commented – evidently, without contemplating the irony – that South Africans who were oppressed under apartheid “have forgiven oppressors but with no benefit to the oppressed.”
To remind the Minister, among the reasons that previously oppressed South Africans haven’t received benefits from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission process is because the government, which she represents, declined to implement the commission’s recommendations.
• Government paid people designated victims of apartheid a fraction of the reparations recommended by the commission:
• Perpetrators in most cases the commission recommended for prosecution have died without any action being taken against them;
• Recommendations on narrowing structural inequality, including implementing a wealth tax, were ignored; and
• Billions of Rands is sitting unspent in the President’s Fund, established under the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act.
Minister Ntshaveni should know that the TRC was not set up purely as a platform for forgiveness. It had teeth, which depended on the State’s willingness to use them.
By honouring its obligations to the country’s amnesty and reconciliation processes, the government would have honoured victims of apartheid. Instead, its failure to implement the commission’s recommendations cheapened the process.
The assassination of Communist Party leader Chris Hani, in 1993, nearly derailed negotiations to end apartheid.
While we say good riddance to bad rubbish – to Waluś – we call on government to do more to implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to carry out prosecutions, to spend the money languishing in the President’s Fund, to reduce inequality.
The latest 2023/24 President Fund financials show government earned more in interest on cash in the bank than they spent on TRC Reparations last year, with R164m earned and only R38m spent.
The GOOD Party supports the proposal to open an inquest into Hani’s murder. While we know about Waluś and Derby-Lewis’s roles, conspiracy theories about the involvement of other people abound and should be put to bed.
Media enquiries: media@forgood.org.za