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Picture Courtesy :(Polity/SashneeMoodley) DA MP Renaldo Gouws suspended for racial slurs.
(The Post News) – Renaldo Gouws, the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Member of Parliament (MP), has been suspended following the resurfacing of an old video of him using the K-word to refer to black South Africans.
The K-word has a dark past in South Africa; during the apartheid era, white racists mainly used it as a demeaning term for black South Africans.
Gouws was sworn in as MP on Friday, June 14, in the first sitting of the National Assembly, and some members of the public expressed their dissatisfaction about his being MP on social media.
The old video of him speaking about “reverse apartheid” resurfaced online days after he was sworn in, and in the video, he was heard shouting “Kill all the k****rs” and stating that even though white people are portrayed as the enemy, no one would notice if Africa vanished off the planet.
A petition demanding that he be removed from his position as MP was initiated on Change.org by Kimberly Jones, who claimed that Gouws is racist. By Tuesday morning, over 40, 000 people had signed the petition.
Gouws apologised for the way he spoke in the video and denied the accusations of him being racist. According to Gouws, he was young and still a student, and the video made him come across as someone who was vile, confrontational, furious, and rude.
He said that he published a long Facebook post from 2013 in which he expressed his regret for the way his message was conveyed.
Initially, the DA distanced itself from both the video’s content and tone and said that even though the party accepts the cry for Gouws’s head, it believes that he has learned from this experience.
Furthermore, the DA noted that Gouws removed the video from social media more than a decade ago and issued an apology in 2013 regarding the content of the video. According to the DA, Gouws genuinely regrets this outburst of over ten years.
On Wednesday, the DA said that it would verify whether the video was real or fake, and this morning, a media statement stating that Gouws has been suspended with immediate effect was released.
The DA had initially believed that the video was fake, and it stated in the statement that it has been able to prove that the video, in which Gouws used “execrable language,” is real and not fake, as it was first believed.
Moreover, the DA stated that Gouws is consequently under immediate suspension by the DA Federal Executive while he is the subject of disciplinary proceedings before the Federal Legal Commission of the party.
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