The 3031st meeting of the 111th session of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) aired yesterday, and I sat through all three hours so you don't have to.

This hearing demonstrated the broad ignorance and frivolity of most UN delegates, though they occasionally demonstrated flickers of intellect, at least when speaking on the issues of xenophobic violence.

The South African delegation was led by Ronald Lamola, Minister of Justice and Correctional services, MS Nkosi, ambassador of SA to UN in Geneva. Other ministers were present as well.

Ronald Lamola opened the address to the committee by boasting of the measures to combat “racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia”, mentioning various task teams and initiatives, such as the Rapid Response Mechanism Task Team for identifying xenophobia and racism.

The government also boasted of its Hate Speech Bill recently passed by the National Assembly, racialised sensitivity training for police officers to combat “police profiling”, and renewed efforts to prosecute white people for commission of apartheid crimes.

He also boasted of the successes of our education system which, while globally recognised as one of the worst in the world, was touted as having provided access to this poor quality education for over 10m children through free schools.

Upgrading of informal settlements was also touted, along with the “success” of the BEE framework, and Lamola stated that the policy has to go on for a very long time, to “reverse the legacy of apartheid”, boasting of the racial and sexual transformation of courts, where success was indicated by having made white judges a minority. He noted the significant reforms to promote women in the public services, and blamed private sector for “retarded” progress.

Interestingly, he also brought up efforts to combat bride kidnapping (ukuthwala) and other “harmful traditional practices”, such as witch burnings and muti killings.

The Land Courts Bill, which raises hearsay to the level of written and material evidence in court, was also on the brag list, promoted as a “fair measure” for redistribution of land.

The Member from Germany Dr Mehrdad Payandeh began by castigating South Africa for the tardiness of the combined 9th-11th report, which was intended to arrive in 2020, but was delivered only a year later.

He accused South Africa of having flawed statistical measurements, as did other members of the committee, who were confused about the “Coloured” category in censuses, and the Bikoist definition of blackness (including Coloureds and Indians) which characterises documents on transformation. They were also confused about our bicameral legislature and asked what the National Council of Provinces was, as well as how a Constitutional Court works, despite it being a fairly common arrangement around the world.

The UN delegate requested disaggregated data on immigration, regarding age, nationality, socioeconomic status, and documentation status.

It is rare that our Minister for Home Affairs is given an opportunity to look competent, but simply by reading out the basic guidelines on documentation, demonstrated the UN to be rather limited in their capacity for reading comprehension.

The only question that did not receive a response was that on “indigenous peoples”, i.e., Khoisan identification – why it was not tracked in national race statistics.

While the German delegate accused the government of not promoting civic awareness, that awareness of constitution is limited, weaker in blacks than other groups, and civic classes absent in schools, diversity/human rights content not in the curriculum, the response came that literally every single task in our schools is saturated with this ideological content, and that civics education regarding human rights forms the core of the Life Orientation class curriculum.

Concern about the xenophobic pogroms and lynchings in recent years were responded to in a particularly flippant manner. They were characterised as merely “sporadic attacks”, which are purely motivated by economic desperation.

Of course, Lamola and our diplomatic representative MS Nkosi took the time to explain that the predominant cause of these tensions was white people hiring foreigners and causing these tensions – that their exclusion of natives from the workforce was driving the economic desperation which led to farm murders.

As they wove this into a narrative around farm murders, they repeated that there was not a single case of racially motivated attack on white farmers, but plenty of instances of white farmers murdering their farm workers for racial reasons.

The UN delegate from Germany also  asked what the state intended to do to suppress political parties that wish to restrict immigration, and why they haven’t been subjected to prosecution.

This sort of questioning was echoed by other delegates, who wished to see more intense prosecution of deviants from the official ideology, and further alignment of South African legislation with the UN’s political dogma, as the Cameroonian delegate Regine Esseneme expressed, by saying that not all public speech disapproved of by the UN was yet made illegal.

This managed to make South Africa’s delegates look like reasonable defenders of civil liberty in comparison, when Doc Mashabane pointed out that we cannot simply criminalise political opposition in a democratic country.

To her credit, Esseneme did bring up farm murders, even highlighting the murder of Brendan Horner and the advocacy of the burning of the Senekal farms by Mbuyiseni Ndlozi. But Lamola’s response, which shifted all blame for racial and xenophobic violence onto white people, was recieved passively by most of the committee.

However, Ms. Esseneme followed up by calling the South African delegation's answers vague and mentioning that a report submitted to CERD by AfriForum in 2022 report documented at least 2 cases of farm murders that were directly connected to the "Kill the Boer" chant. She requested that the South African delegation provide CERD with more details on these cases, as well as on the prosecution of farm murders.

Lamola said he will get back to the comittee.

The Algerian representative praised South Africa as the greatest champion of anti-discrimination in the world, and beat the table about our support for Palestine and condemnation of Israel, while condemning Europe as a racist continent overrun by wild populists. Other softball contributions, like Cameroon’s one - what has been done to repeal racially discriminatory laws – were received with ease and pleasure.

The member from the Ivory Coast, Bakari Sidiki Diaby seemed not to comprehend basic principles of rule of law. He brought up xenophobia and racism in sports, and asked why Graham Smith wasn’t sent to jail, and that his clearance of accusations related to discriminatory language was no good.

He also asked what government was doing to destroy Orania, since it had no place on the African continent. Doc Mashabane responded by pointing out that there is no legal means for dealing with the settlement, pointing out that it is on private land, and does not apply racial categories to applications to live there, and that so far, no non-whites have shown an intention to move to Orania.

The member from Turkey, Gün Kut said our funding of the SAHRC is not sufficient, that they should be empowered to do achieve whatever they desire, and that the absence of public funding is not a valid excuse, as if the public purse were a bottomless pit.

The member from America, Gay McDougall just wanted to hear about Operation Dudula and how they were to be dealt with.

Lamola of course responded that they had duly condemned the anti-immigrant group, but that monitoring and policing of political ideologies is unconstitutional.  

Interestingly, Lamola promiseed to release racial victimisation statistics, which have been embargoed since 2003, when a Mandela-era report commissioned into farm murders revealed that 66% of rural homicides were of whites, despite whites being only 5% of the rural population. The release of these statistics, if they do come to light, will be the first time in 20 years that racial crime statistics could be compared without resorting to small-n crime surveys.

Our diplomat MS Nkosi was emphatic that xenophobia is not an issue, and that we have always welcomed foreign nationals, one of the few African countries with an “infusion” of foreign migrants, where everyone is integrated well.

He argued that, if what all the delegates said were true, one wouldn’t see so many immigrants queueing up to enter SA. He also pointed the finger at the other nations on the committee, by pointing out that attacks on foreigners is rather common in their countries, and that South Africa at least doesn’t deport illegal immigrants.

The minister for Home Affairs also boasted of our over 1m refugees.

The government pointed out that education about xenophobia is done on a Pan-Africanist basis, and that concerns about xenophobia were being primarily addressed on the basis that all black Africans are one.

The impression one gets is of a room full of ignorant and incompetent people chasing ghosts. Any informed person, as many reading this will be, could easily make mincemeat of South Africa’s presentation, but the quality of delegates to the chamber were rather poor.

South Africa itself though, has presented a very clear picture – nationality is irrelevant, but race is of utmost importance. White people are guilty of every ill facing our country, and continue to be the sole source of racially discriminatory behaviour, even the cause of violence in others.

To place the blame of xenophobia at the feet of the white man, and even to place blame on white farmers for their own farm attacks for hiring foreigners, while all black South Africans are desperate innocents merely scrabbling for scarce resources in an economic husk left to them 30 years ago, is not only divorced from reality, but is so obviously insane and mendacious, that a common moron could punch holes in it.

But common morons seems to be a high standard at the UN, perhaps something that would challenge their drive for human equality.

AfriForum and Solidariteit will be presenting their cases on racial discrimination in South Africa in the coming days. AfriForum already submitted a report to CERD in 2022 on various issues impacting minorities in South Africa, including farm murders. This year, AfriForum submitted another report, which specifically documented the South African government's many many pieces of racial legislation. The submission of the second report was accompanied by an opportunity to do a presentation before CERD.

The likelihood that the government will have detailed responses, given the quality of past responses, is unlikely. The question remains whether the UN has the quality of intellect and character to recognise these submissions.

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