The Judicial Conduct Committee has recommended that Western Cape Judge Mushtak Parker face an impeachable conduct tribunal to investigate whether he has brought the judiciary into disrepute.

“The two complaints will, if established, prima facie indicate gross misconduct on the part of the respondent,” said Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, who is the committee’s acting chairperson. 

Parker has been accused of two different incidents of dishonesty, which — if found to be true — are “extremely serious”, Zondo said in written reasons from the committee.

The first complaint came from 10 of his colleagues on the Western Cape high court bench. Parker is the judge alleged to have been assaulted by Judge-President John Hlophe, in an incident that is at the centre of a related fight between Hlophe and his deputy, Patricia Goliath. 

Goliath has made her own judicial misconduct complaint against Hlophe, accusing him of a range of misconduct — including having assaulted Parker. In answer to her complaint, the judge president denied the claim. He also said that he had shown this part of his affidavit to “the judge concerned” who agreed. 

But, said Parker’s colleagues, Parker had told a number of them that he had indeed been assaulted. He had even disposed to an affidavit saying as much in the presence of colleague Judge Derek Wille, they said. There were now two “mutually destructive” versions he had given.

The committee said that when it met to consider the complaints Parker had not attended the meeting. But “on these facts, if the first complaint is established, the position will be that the respondent has no explanation for giving these contradictory versions, one of which has to be untrue”, said Zondo.

He emphasised that the committee’s job was to look at the allegations only on a prima facie basis. 

“To the extent that there may not have been any assault on the respondent [Parker] by Judge-President Hlophe, it would mean that the respondent went around telling a number of Judges that the Judge-President had assaulted him when he knew quite well that there had been no such assault,” said Zondo.

On the other hand “to the extent that there may have been an assault on him by Judge-President Hlophe, it would mean that, when he confirmed Judge-President Hlophe’s version, he did so with the full knowledge that he was corroborating a version that he knew to be untrue.” 

This would be seen as “extremely serious, particularly because he is a judge”, the committee said.

The second complaint came from the Western Cape advocate body, the Cape Bar Council. The council complained that when Parker applied to be a judge, he had given dishonest answers to the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) in a questionnaire aspirant judges complete ahead of their interview.

Judge Parker had been an attorney before he was appointed a judge. At the firm at which he practiced as a partner before his appointment there had been a long-term deficit in the firm’s trust account — because of misappropriation of trust monies, which is a breach of attorneys’ ethical rules. Not reporting it when you have knowledge of it is also an ethical breach. 

Yet when the JSC questionnaire asked if there were any circumstances, financial or otherwise, that may cause embarrassment if he were to become a judge, Parker replied: “No.”

The committee said that if this were to be established it would be potentially impeachable: “The respondent’s failure to disclose in his nomination questionnaire and in the interview before the JSC that the trust account of his law firm had had a deficit for a long time while he was the managing director is extremely serious,” said Zondo.

The committee’s recommendation must now go to the JSC, which, if it agrees with the committee, would then request its chairperson, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, to establish a Judicial Conduct Tribunal to investigate potentially impeachable conduct.

Tuesday.

Lockdown day 75.

I’m still adjusting to life under level 3 of the Covid-19 regulations.

It’s taking a bit of getting used to: being able to move around more freely — along with everyone else — to buy beer and get a takeaway or to go fishing, but doing so with the knowledge that on a daily basis increasing numbers of people are getting sick and dying.

As the numbers rise, so does the chance of my family and me getting infected. It’s a horrible thing to have to live with. It’s essentially time to live and let die, to go about your business knowing that as you do so, the bodies are piling up and that you are just one exposure away from joining them.

Schools and churches are reopening, the universities and technikons look set to follow, so the only way forward is to live life, but cautiously, with regard for your own life, and those of others.

Despite this gloomy outlook, there’s a serious bounce in my step as I hit the queue outside the local photocopy shop. We’ve just got a notice that our applications for Ters (the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme) funding to make up for the Covid-19 salary cuts we’ve been hit with have been processed by the department of labour. The department has sent us the banking forms that need to be stamped and submitted, along with a certified ID copy, by Friday, so that we can get our first payout. It won’t cover all my losses, but the money will pay my 13-year-old’s school fees. 

I’m stoked.

It’s not just the knowledge that all my years of contributing to the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) are paying off and I’m getting something back from the state at a time when I need it.

It’s also a reminder that our government works, a reassurance, an antidote to the incessant online white-whining that’s accompanied the lockdown.

It’s not my first time collecting UIF. Journalism will do that. So will having a backbone. I’ve never had a problem with joining the UIF queue to sign for what’s mine from the state. I’m one of those citizens who renders unto Caesar with a smile.

My old man, Gerald, was a “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” kind of a cat. It rubbed off on me, so I cough up my UIF contributions, the deductions to the South African Revenue Service, willingly.

The photocopy shop is doing things properly.

Physical distance in the queue outside. Foot pump sanitiser at the door and a cap on the number of bodies allowed inside at a time. There are “No mask, no entry” signs at the door.

Everybody inside, customers and staff alike, knows what’s required for as many of us to make it through this pandemic as possible. Everybody’s playing the game. Respect.

All of a sudden, this white cat, about my age but a fair bit taller and heavier, storms into the shop, cutting the queue and ignoring everybody waiting their turn to enter and be served. The manager asks him to put his mask on and join the queue like the rest of us.

Our man gets all 1652. Refuses to mask up and get to the back of the queue. Starts talking shit about there being no virus, no deaths, no pandemic. I snap.

Perhaps it’s the pent up frustration over 75 days of lockdown; perhaps it’s all the racist drivel I’ve been forced to listen to about the cigarette and booze ban, but in an instant I’m enraged, engulfed with a crystal clear, deadly rage. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that privileged, denialist muppets like this have driven the pandemic in South Africa and that this particular idiot might as well be pointing a gun at me, holding a knife to my neck, but right now, I’m ready to kill this guy.

I tell him that if he doesn’t put his mask on, I’m gonna fuck him up. He opens his mouth to continue spewing his anti-science nonsense. In a millisecond, I’ve halved the distance between us. I’m the most nonviolent person I know, but I’m preparing to kick his ankles out from under him, smash his head into the counter as he goes down, finish him with a flurry of size 10s when he hits the deck, make sure he stays down.

Our man’s mouth shuts. He turns and runs out of the now silent photocopy shop without a word. Perhaps he saw the death in my eyes. Perhaps he’s realised that life isn’t Facebook and that it’s 2020, not 1948. Perhaps he’s gone home to get a mask. I don’t really care. He’s no longer posing a threat to my life. That’s all that matters right now.

Our political class has been vocal in its condemnation of the murder of George Floyd. It has been quick to align itself to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. His death is a clear wrong, and happening far away enough it requires no action of them here. An easy win.

In the two week of Floyd protests, excessive plumes of black smoke poured out of the smokestacks of the Engen refinery in the South Durban Basin. This sparked a wave of respiratory illness and other health problems, according to the residents of Wentworth. That refinery, along with its peers, has been polluting people’s lungs for decades. Engen denies this.

South African industries have consistently denied a link between their activities and children with asthma or animals dying in polluted rivers. It can hardly be a coincidence that people who live near sources of pollution get sick and die.

Everyone is affected by pollution, but it is the poorest — black people — who paid and still pay the price. These are people who were forced to live next to steel mills by the apartheid regime, or who cannot find anywhere else where they can afford a family home.

This treatment of black lives as inconsequential is woven into this country’s fabric. The colonial system expanded by killing the original owners of the land. Without land to eke out a living, people had no choice but to work in the mines and factories, living in areas designated according to colour.

Since 1994, we have had excellent legislation to control pollution, but business has continued as usual. Although the new environment minister recently said pollution control measures will be enforced.

In South Durban, those with money live on the top of the hills facing the ocean, where the fresh air is, above Wentworth, Austerville, the Bluff and Treasure Beach, the areas most affected by the recent emissions. Government has done little. This is despite the area being a hive of strong environmental action and protest. An activist from the area won the Goldman Prize, considered the most prestigious environmental prize in the world, for their opposition to industries such as Engen.

That refinery has dragged protestors to court to take away their right to protest for the right to breathe clean air. It is hard to imagine this happening if these were white, wealthy lives. And it is not a unique situation. Poor people sucking in pollution is the norm in South Africa. Companies cutting corners and saving money is the norm because pollution doesn’t show up on their balance sheet. Black people dying as a result is the norm.

If black lives really mattered to our leaders, we would take pollution seriously.

Few countries in the world were well-prepared for the coronavirus. Even some of the best-funded, most well-equipped health systems have struggled to cope. In hard-hit Italy and Spain, annual government expenditure on healthcare per capita is more than $1 800, more than twice the global average. In the UK, it’s more than $3 000.

Sudan is less prepared than most. Its government spends less than $100 per capita every year on healthcare. It has 10 times fewer doctors per person and eight times fewer nurses than Italy and Spain. In the whole country, there are fewer than 200 intensive care beds, for a population of 42-million people.

But Sudan has one factor that doesn’t appear on World Health Organisation databases and that most countries don’t have — neighbourhood resistance committees. There are hundreds of these committees around the country, typically comprising 40 or so volunteers ranging in age from 17 to 70, although most are in their twenties. They came to prominence early last year during the country’s revolution, when they organised local protest marches against the brutal 30-year rule of dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Throughout the six-month uprising, they braved tear gas, beatings and live bullets fired by security forces that killed dozens of committee members. In the capital, Khartoum, together with hundreds of thousands of other protesters, they staged a sit-in outside military headquarters, which precipitated Bashir’s removal in a military coup.

Bashir was replaced by a transitional government comprising military and civilian arms, which has embarked on an ambitious project to return the country to democracy.

The coronavirus pandemic came at a bad time for Sudan’s fragile transition. The health effects are a test of the competence of the civilian-run ministry of health, but the virus’s economic ramifications are perhaps an even greater threat. With inflation already running at more than 80% and the value of the Sudanese pound plummeting against the dollar, curfews have brought a halt to an economy that was in dire need of a boost.

Rising bread and fuel prices were the spark for the uprising against Bashir, and many Sudanese citizens are worried that if the economic misery intensifies, the risk of a coup by military members of the government or by one of the country’s many armed groups will increase.

The neighbourhood resistance committees see themselves as the guardians of the revolution and, to help the democratic process to stay on track, they have mucked in to combat the pandemic. Hashim, an IT engineer who spends his spare time volunteering for a resistance committee in Khartoum, told me that, before the virus hit, they were still holding marches to put pressure on politicians.

“We’ve also been painting revolutionary artwork and writing music,” he said, “and we’re exposing corruption and trying to solve problems with transport and food shortages. We take on any role that advances the revolution’s objectives of freedom, peace and justice.”

Another young resister is Hadara (it’s still not considered safe for them to give me their full names). He and his peers have been making hand sanitisers, using alcohol that is sometimes used for making illegal liquor in a country in which Sharia law is still in place.

“The health infrastructure is hugely depleted,” Hadara tells me. “If Covid-19 explodes in Sudan, I’m afraid the health sector won’t be able to cope. We try to help them because we want the revolutionary government to succeed.”

The hand sanitisers are distributed to street vendors, street children and to Khartoum’s tea ladies, a few of whom can still be found sitting under trees in the dust serving hot drinks to physically distancing customers. The committees have also helped to sterilise markets, mosques and bus stands; to monitor the queues outside bakeries to make sure people stand sufficiently far apart; and to educate their neighbours — in face-to-face sessions, on social media and through street graffiti — about how to protect themselves from infection.

The committees get their information on the coronavirus from government briefings and from the Sudanese doctors’ committee, which was also active during the revolution and whose members were the subject of particularly violent persecution Bashir’s security forces.

Dr Salma, a cardiologist, reports that resistance committees were already helping to renovate hospitals before the coronavirus struck. “Now they are fixing ventilators and hospital beds, too,” she says. “Everyone works on their own speciality, but together we complement each other.”

The committees are also helping to mitigate the economic effects of the disease. They distribute bread, sugar and cooking gas to people who are confined to their homes. They deliver food to street children. And they are helping to identify the poorest families in each neighbourhood — the ones whose survival depends on earning a daily income — so that they can receive help from the government.

Mohamed Kamal, whose family have been in quarantine for two weeks in their home in Omdurman after his father contracted the virus, says support from the resistance committees, some of whose members have been given permission to move around during curfews, has been invaluable. “They’ve been delivering groceries to us,” he says. “Our relatives and friends can’t get to us because of the curfew, so help from within the neighbourhood has been really important.”

Although their work is making a difference, some resistance committee members are keen to get back to more traditional revolutionary activities. “Our task,” says Hashim, “is to keep up the pressure on the government, expose corruption and make sure each minister and state governor is doing the right things to help our revolution to succeed. It shouldn’t be up to resistance committees to deliver coronavirus services. But because the government hasn’t been able to carry out its duties at the local level, we have no choice but to get involved.”

Mark Weston is a consultant and writer based in Khartoum. He is the author of the West Africa travel memoir The Ringtone and the Drum. This piece was first broadcast as a radio feature on BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent

Senzo Mkhize was in the middle of writing a test when he lost network coverage. He attempted to log back on to the online platform to finish his test, but it would not allow him to.

He got 15 out 100 for that test.

“The network coverage here is so poor that sometimes I have to go up the mountain just to have a better signal,” he told the Mail & Guardian.

But this is not Mkhize’s only struggle. He did not have money for data for online learning. His mother, the only breadwinner in the household, did not make money during the lockdown because she is self-employed.

On days when Mkhize did have data he would log on to the online learning system only to establish that there was a test that was going to be written the next day or that an assignment was due.

All of this left the fourth-year B.Ed student at the University of Zululand discouraged, and it  forced him to take a difficult decision.

Mkhize deregistered from his course last month. “It was not an easy decision to make but conditions were dictating otherwise,” he says.

Mkhize was not writing tests or submitting assignments and he figured that it would be better to continue with his studies next year. “To tell you the truth, I was really struggling,” says Mkhize, from Empangeni. He says although his family was not happy with this decision, they supported it because they saw what he was going through.

In April, UniZulu announced that it had negotiated zero-rated data with MTN, Telkom and Cell C in so its students could access teaching and learning on its online platform without incurring data costs.

But Mkhize uses Vodacom, so he missed out. In any case, this would not have addressed his problem with the network coverage. He says it took him time to arrive at his decision because he had hoped for an announcement to allow students who were battling to study at home to return to campus.

Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister Blade Nzimande made that announcement last month; on Monday he published directions for the phased-in return of students to campuses.

As of June 1, under level three, higher education institutions are allowed to have 33% of their students return to campus. These students comprise mainly final-year students, those who need laboratories, and all students needing clinical training.

The return to campus came a little too late for students like Mkhize. Although he was a final-year student, he says he was so far behind with his studies that he did not see the possibility of passing.

None of the universities have yet said when the level-three category of students will be back on campus.

However, in the gazette, Nzimande said the institutions need to consider a number of factors, because they allow for the phased-in return of staff and students to campus and residences.

Only staff and students who have received communication from their institution that can return to campus and residences. They will be issued with permits by the institutions.

The directions say that all first-year students in undergraduate programmes will return to campus in level two while the rest of the student population will be back in level one.