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2009-04-01 Two farmers killed for ‘muti’ in Free State

 

Witchcraft_Shop_in_Johannesburg_South_Africa 

2009-04-01 Jan van Wyk, 82, and Basie Venter, 65, mutilated cruelly on their farms, Vierfontein Viljoenskroon, Free State

Bloemfontein - The brutal ‘muti-related murders’ of two Free State farmers at Vierfontein were deplored by the commercial farmers body Free State Agriculture on Wednesday.

Free State Agriculture president Louw Steytler strongly condemned the cowardly and gross manner of the murders.

"I urge farmers to get involved in Free State Agriculture's rural safety plan," he said in a statement.

This follows the arrest of an unnamed, 25-year-old man on Tuesday morning on the farm of Jan van Wyk, 82, at Vierfontein.

  • It was reported that the man was found sweeping the veranda and calmly making food on Tuesday morning, when he was discovered by Johan Engelbrecht and other members of Free State Agriculture's rural safety organisation. The man ran inside the homestead and threatened the security detail with gardening shears. They were able to apprehend him, however, reported Tom de Wet and Marisa Phillips of Beeld newspaper. see

Van Wyk's mutilated body was found in the dining room of the house. One of the suspected murder weapons and beads covered in blood were found buried in the fields next to a lion camp near a neighbouring farmer Basie Venter’s homestead, who was found murdered just hours earlier.

Van Wyk,  a retired policeman who only alone stayed on his farm over the weekends, was allegedly lured outside where he was bashed over the head with a shovel, dragged inside the homestead while still alive -- and then mutilated.  This is a clear indication that this was a 'murder to harvest body parts for ‘traditional medicine’, as this is inevitably done while the poor victims are still alive.

Johan Engelbrecht of Free State Farm Security said he was investigating the muti-murder of another neighbouring farmer, Basie Venter, 65, a few hours before when another farmer stopped him on the road and  warned him that he ‘suspected trouble’ on the Van Wyk farm next door, too. Van Wyk wasn’t on his stoep as he usually did early in the morning, reading his Bible.

There seems little doubt that the same man was also involved in the murder of Basie Venter. Venter's widow Mary, 68, had witnessed the attack around 21:15 on Monday through a window in the house. Venter was attacked with an iron rod, police said.

Steytler conveyed the organisation's sympathy to the victim's families. “We regret these brutal attacks and murders on the farmers."

Steytler said the murders, which seemed muti-related, was ‘barbaric and had no place in a modern world’.

Kroonstad police spokesman Maselela Langa confirmed the murders. He said the 25-year-old man, a Lesotho citizen, appeared in the Viljoenskroon Magistrate's Court on Wednesday.  He did not provide the arrested man’s name nor his motives. The matter was postponed to April 7. see

MUTI-MURDERS – A CRUEL PHENOMENON:

Muti-related murders occur very frequently in South Africa.  For instance, the South African Police Service reports reported on August 20, 2008 that three men were arrested for selling traditional medicine in Bushbuckridge, Limpopo province – and were actually jailed for it: an unusual event…

Left to right: South African restaurant-owner Floyd Mokoena, son Toto and friend Justice Ndubane in the Bushbuckridge Magistrates' Court, for the muti-murder of Floyd's nephew Clarence Brown on 15 August 2008. They slaughtered Brown alive for body parts on 23 February 2008 on behest of a witchdoctor which made 'lucky potions' out of this human flesh for them, and were found guilty. The witchdoctor was not charged.

SA Police captain L Hlati reported that on 15 August 2008, three suspects were arrested by his team for a case related to a 'muti'-murder (human body-parts harvested for 'traditional medicine') and that they were charged in the Bushbuckridge Magistrates' Court. Businessman Patrick Floyd Mokoena (58), his son, Sydney Toto Mokoena (33) and his son's friend Mjojo Justice Ndubane (28).

They admitted that they had brutally murdered Floyd's nephew Clarence Brown (25) on 23 February 2008, and were jailed.

Desperately needed body parts:

Their testimony was that Floyd told his son that he desperately needed human body parts 'to make his four businesses quickly churn big bucks'.

The suspected businessman owns the Lebohang Bar Lounge, a restaurant in Tekamahala Trust, another in Oakley near Hazyview as well as a liquor-outlet in Oakley.

Body parts from a family member said the witch doctor:
His son Toto asked his friends -- Mjojo Justice Ndubane and another unidentified suspect -- to help. They went in search for Floyd's nephew Clarence Brown -- as the witchdoctor's advice was that the body parts needed to be of a family member. The victim was found drinking at the Sizanani 2 Bar Lounge in Oakley with his friends. The suspects waited at a bridge where the nephew was supposed to pass when going home - and offered him a lift.

The suspects made formal admissions to the arresting police that they 'cut his body parts while he was still alive' - while seated inside a blue Venture kombi belonging to Floyd.

They then threw the victim's lifeless body in the middle of the road in Oakley, under the false pretense that the victim had been involved in a hit-and-run accident.

The three suspects were arrested by the Organised Crime Unit between 13 and 14 August 2008 while sitting relaxed at their homes, thinking that their evil deeds had gone unnoticed, Captain Hlathi wrote in his police report. see

Orphans redefined in S.Africa

 

Adriana Stuijt asks: are there even enough taxpayers left in South Africa to help pay for the massive health care needed for so many millions of TB+AIDS sufferers, and to pay for the massive social welfare and housing schemes need to take care of millions of orphaned children, as visualised by the ANC’s caretaker health minister Barbara Logan?

The Children’s Institute of the University of Cape Town has found that the media's perception of both “AIDS orphans” and child-headed households has little basis in reality. "We need to redefine the word 'orphan', says researcher Katharine Hall...

April 4 2009 Hall was presenting her research findings at the 4th South African AIDS Conference in Durban this week.

3,4 million AIDS-orphans…

By 2005, some 802,000 South African children had lost a mother to HIV-AIDS and by 2008, more than 3.4 million children under the age of 18 have lost either a mother or a father, or both parents, according to the Actuarial Society of South Africa. Almost 70% of all orphans in 2004 were 'paternal orphans': i.e. whose fathers had died, but whose mothers were still alive that year. see

Giving orphaned children the legal rights of adults:

To help this growing army of orphans run their own households more efficiently even if there are adult carers around, South Africa is currently also rewriting many of its laws -- giving orphans the responsibilities and judicial rights usually only granted to adults, such as the right for such children to access public housing and social-care grants. see

In the popular imagination, Katherine Hall says, 'the face of the AIDS epidemic in southern Africa is often an orphan who has lost both parents to the virus and is now fending for him or herself in a household made up solely of other children."

Many child-headed households certainly exist in South Africa, but the commonly held wisdom, reinforced by the media and foreign aid-agencies, that extended families cannot absorb any more orphans, and that the number of child-headed households has been rising steeply in recent years due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, has never been backed up by solid data, she noted.

The Institute estimates that AIDS orphans account for 37 percent of all the orphans in South Africa, and that 80 percent of those have a surviving parent. The parent might not always be around, however: dad or mom may be migrant workers...

By analyzing data from 22 national government household and labour surveys between 2000 and 2006, Hall and her colleagues have found that the registration of child-headed households in South Africa had not increased in that period -- remaining below one percent.

However, a note of caution must be sounded here -- as these official records may not be an accurate reflection of the reality on the ground: it is important to note that it also is still very difficult to register AIDS-orphans' birth certificates once the mother has died: the mother has to be present to obtain the child's birth certificate under South African law, and 'alternative forms of identification' are thus far, hardly ever accepted, thus leaving many children in permanent limbo. see

At the moment however, Hall says that the official records show that orphans who had lost both parents accounted for 8 percent of child-headed households - and most such households were located in three largely rural provinces: Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.

  • No child-headed households were recorded in the more urban provinces housing cities such as Gauteng's Pretoria and Johannesburg – which seems an astonishing find, given the large numbers of unattended children roaming the streets night and day:  as is regularly being reported by police, journalists and aid-agencies.

Hall argued that the focus on HIV as the main cause of child-headed households has masked other social realities, such as the need for many parents in rural areas to migrate to cities to find work.

She says this has skewed the authorities' interventions which were set up to address the problem.

  • “The existence of living parents in the majority of cases suggest it’s inappropriate to conceive of these households as permanent arrangements requiring intervention or dissolution,” she said.

Authorities often hinder when abandoned children need help:

Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu has frequently blasted the government of President Thabo Mbeki for delaying the rollout of life-prolonging AIDS drugs, leading to "unnecessary" deaths, a typical example of government intervention in an essentially medical/sociological issue. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

While it is widely recognized that the most effective interventions for orphaned or abandoned children are those that support family members to care for them, bureaucratic requirements for accessing such support have tended to hinder rather than help this process, she also warned.

No birth certificates, no government aid:

Sonja Giese, researcher for the Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security (ACESS) also presented her findings at the AIDS conference, into the major obstacles being put in place by government agencies when obtaining birth registration documents for children.

Without them, caregivers are unable to access social grants and other forms of government assistance such as public housing.

  • "Registering a child’s birth requires the presence of the mother, who must present her own identification document. There are no alternatives for children living with other caregivers," she said.

11-million children on $20 per month...

Yet the need is dire, she warns: about 48.5% or 21.9-million of the South African population live below the national poverty line of R354 ($35) per month.

  • And some 60% (11-million) of all children in South Africa live in dire poverty on less than R200 ($20) per month.

Approximately 30% of the country’s population also suffers from ' food insecurity ' in which they can only afford two hot meals or less a week.

  • For many children this means starvation.

From the 22 infant deaths per 1,000 recorded by the apartheid-government before 1994, the country's infant mortality rate has by 2008, dropped to 45 per 1,000 average -- and the death rate for under-fives dropped to 59 per 1,000 by 2008 on average countrywide. In some regions like KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, the death rates are considerably higher for small children than the national average.

99.5 per 1,000 child mortality rate by 2010…

And mainly due to the co-infection of AIDS and Tuberculosis, the under-5 mortality rate is expected to double by the year 2010 to 99.5 per 1,000.

Picture: One example of an orphan who wasn’t an orphan: Gayle Johnson of Cape Town adopted the HIV-infected boy Nkosi although he was not orphaned: his biological mother was unable to care for him. This gutsy child gained fame when he lambasted Pres Thabo Mbeki at an AIDS-conference, asking him to provide antiretroviral medicines for HIV-infected moms and -children. While Nkosi lived a full albeit far too brief life, he proved that ARV-treatment gives sufferers a better, longer life.

"Right now in South Africa, one in every ten children is infected with a chronic illness because of the incredibly filthy conditions many have to live in.

  • Many children use pit latrines for toilets.
  • Twenty-four percent of schools have no clean water within walking distance and an average of one toilet per 20 learners.
  • And 11.7% of schools have no sanitation at all.

According to South Africa's Education Atlas, approximately 1.2 million children of school-going age are not attending school, and some 40,000 children attend on a part-time basis only.

  • In March last year, Acess sued the Department of Social Security in the Pretoria High Court for information, to be supplied within six months, on the number of applicants for the child support grants which were denied and approved due to the lack of a birth certicate. They also sued the director-general to change its rules by accepting 'alternative forms of documentation' in order to get all the undocumented children into the government's child-grant system. see This ruling is still pending.

Enormous costs of ARVs:

Meanwhile, South Africa's Acting Health Minister Barbara Hogan said at the closing ceremony of the AIDS Conference in Durban on Friday April 3 2009, that she was concerned about the high costs of scaling up South Africa's HIV/AIDS treatment programme to meet the enormous need.

Some provinces showed serious budget overruns and she was dispatching teams of financial experts during the course of the year to find out why, she said.

And, with her re-election as health minister in a new cabinet, formed after the April 22 elections still uncertain, Hogan nevertheless remains committed to get 80 percent of the country's more than 6-million HIV-infected people on antiretroviral treatment by 2011.

That's why the budgets had to be controlled properly, she said: "We cannot afford to run out of stocks of ARVs," -- referring to such a crisis last year in the Free State Province.

  • "Whilst we may say ARV treatment is expensive, we have no other option; any other option would be far more expensive."

Extremely-drug-resistant Tuberculosis - a growing danger:

She also emphasised the need for border-crossing, interactive health policies when it came to identifying and controlling Extremely-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis cases.

More than six percent of all the thousands of TB-cases in South Africa were diagnosed as drug-resistant, and this clearly is a rapidly-growing danger. see.

The World Health Organisation last year identified South Africa as the epicentre for XDR-TB, but it is now spreading very rapidly throughout southern Africa. See and also see

Hogan urged employers of migrant workers, especially mining companies -- which have actually been running health checks for TB on all their workers for a great many years in South Africa in conjuction with her health department -- " to start investing in better TB prevention and treatment."

She also wants a system of cross-border referrals for TB and HIV, she said.

"It would be foolish to think we can scale up in isolation from our neighbours," she said. "Health knows no borders." Also: see

Africa: global epicentre of AIDS pandemic...

Indeed: Prof Linda-Gail Bekker of the Desmond Tutu HIV foundation, who chaired the Fourth AIDS conference, said "sobering reports continue to identify Africa as the global epicentre of the AIDS pandemic.

“It is highly diverse and especially severe in southern Africa where some of the epidemics continue to expand," she said.

"Even where epidemics are levelling off in this region, they are doing so at exceptionally high levels. An estimated 22.5 million adults and children in sub-Saharan Africa were living with HIV in 2007. By April of that year, (only) 1.3 million people in the region were receiving antiretroviral therapy."

And this is a global problem, Prof Bekker notes:

 'Globally antiretroviral drugs reach only one in five (patients) who need them. Currently only 9% of pregnant women living with HIV in the developing world are provided with ARVs…’

Who will pay for it all?

The question for South Africa’s rapidly shrinking taxpayer-base is of course much more basic than all the worries expanded upon at this AIDS-conference, namely how are their meagre taxes going to be able to pay for all these massive health and social welfare measures?

Only 16,300 expats allowed to vote on April 22…

Out of 1,2-million expatriate South Africans…

 

WillemRichter_SAExpatTeacherUKsuesForVotingRightsAbroad20009  Picture: Willem Richter, SA expat teacher who launched the successful Pretoria High Court case demanding equal voting rights for South Africans abroad…

Cape Town -  April 3 2009 – South Africa’s ‘Independent’ Electoral Commission has approved only 16,300 applications for special votes for South Africans abroad this election. More than 80,000 expat voters had applied to vote with the Freedom Front Party’s office alone, but the SA government can’t accommodate them because they live too far away from government legations to be able to cast their votes…

The IEC released these truly pathetic figures this week.

A total of 7,460 people in London had been approved and would be allowed to cast their votes;  1,228 in Canberra and 889 in Dubai.

  • Smaller numbers of people will also be able vote at other voting points overseas.

This follows orders by the South African Constitutional Court and the Pretoria High Court that registered voters living overseas can vote for the National Assembly inthe April 22, 2009 election in South Africa.

However there is a discrepancy in the number of voters who were approved, and the number who had applied: o On March 27 2009, the Freedom Front Plus had announced that 80,000 expats had informed the IEC that ‘they will be casting their votes overseas during the forthcoming elections, according to Dr. CornĂ© Mulder, Chief Whip of the FF Plus.

“The FF Plus is a party which does not shy away from standing up for South Africans’ rights which is trampled by the ANC government. The 80,000 South Africans who have already indicated that they want to vote on the 15th April can do this as a result of the actions of the FF Plus.

Dr Mulder said they were swamped by complaints of South Africans who have to travel long distances of up to 4,000 km to get to South African missions in the various overseas countries in which they reside.

  • “The party will continue to ensure that all South Africans who find themselves abroad during the general elections which will be held in 2014, will be able to register overseas and that there will be sufficient numbers of voting points abroad for the election. The right to vote is an inalienable right which can not be determined by the ANC government”, said Dr. Mulder. DR. CORNÉ MULDER, Contact no.: 083 626 1497 http://www.vryheidsfront.co.za/

ANC-opposition:

It must be noted here for the official record that this so-called ‘independent’ electoral commission, (which is run by ANC-members) and the ANC-regime have  both actively opposed these court applications all the way to the Constitutional Court, and were subsequently ordered to pay all the costs for the applicants i.e. the taxpayer has to fork over huge amounts of legal costs just to fight for their voting rights in South Africa.

  • It must also be noted that many of the 1,2-million expats send home huge amounts of money to support their relatives still in South Africa. Thus the country’s tax-coffers also benefit from having so many South Africans working abroad…

The entire matter was set into motion by the Freedom Front Plus opposition party on behalf of Willem Richter, a Pretoria school teacher working in the United Kingdom; as well as by  the Inkatha Freedom Party, the Democratic Alliance, the political A-Party  lobby group and a group of South African voters living overseas.

The Pretoria High Court had ruled that the country's Electoral Act was unconstitutional and therefore invalid because it was denying voting facilities to expats.

  • And the  election date was hurriedly called by the country’s acting-ANC president -- before the judgment was even confirmed by the Constitutional Court, thus giving political parties and the IEC far too little time to help organise the foreign electorate’s polling stations…

Freedom Front Plus parliamentarian Willie Spies, who as a lawyer launched the law suits, said they were disappointed that the many tens of thousands of South Africans who live in cities such as Perth, Sydney and Auckland, in Australia, will not be able to vote.

  • "This is due to the long distances to the capital cities where embassies and consulates are situated. The Department of Foreign Affairs was not able to equip all its missions across the globe as voting points. "Cities such as Perth, Sydney and Auckland only have honorary consulates and not fully accredited South African consulates," Spies said.
  • (My comment: the idea of dispatching voting buses has probably not yet occurred to the IDP – but next time, with the Constitutional Court order in hand, they won’t be able to use the excuse of not having enough organising time…)

Spies added that the FF+ will this forthcoming term in parliament step up their campaign to make it easier for South Africans all over the world to cast their votes.

"Our expectation is that the overseas votes will, in future, play a bigger role in the election results," Spies said.

http://www.news24.com/News24/Elections/News/0,,2-2478-2479_2496217,00.html