Africa-Press – South-Africa. The sentencing proceedings of suspended ANC MPL and activist Andile Lili resumed in the Bellville Regional Court in Cape Town on Thursday with three witnesses pleading for leniency after he was convicted of incitement to murder, holding an illegal gathering and assault.
Witnesses testified that while Lili may have made the remarks that got him into trouble, his actions on the ground are the opposite – he prevents vigilante killings.
The incitement to murder conviction relates to comments Lili made outside the same court on 28 July 2015 after he was sentenced to three years, suspended for five, for violating the Civil Aviation Act during his infamous “poo protest” at the Cape Town International Airport in 2013. He led the City-wide protests against poor sanitation in Cape Town’s informal settlements.
He told supporters and the media that South Africa’s justice system had failed the poor and that, because little action was taken against rapists and murderers, they should be killed if they were spotted in the streets.
Lili said afterwards that he spoke in anger after the murder of a child in Khayelitsha, but his actions were reviewed in the light of a country that is faced with regular vigilante killings, so he was charged and convicted.
The illegal gathering conviction was because the Regulation of Gatherings Act makes it a crime to hold a gathering outside Parliament or a courthouse without permission.
The assault conviction relates to his threatening to shoot three women at a fractious SA National Civic Organisation meeting in Delft, on the outskirts of Cape Town.
Lili did not testify during his trial, nor did he bring witnesses. But, in February, he tried to interdict the sentencing proceedings so that he could apply for his case to be reviewed and start again. The application was refused.
Lili is facing the real prospect of jail time, given his previous conviction, and has already been suspended from the ANC. This meant he missed the provincial body’s elective conference, where he was expecting to be nominated from the floor for chairperson.
Prosecutor Peter-John Damons said Lili only showed remorse towards the end of his case and did not grasp how serious it was to tell supporters to murder someone or to threaten to shoot people in Delft, one of the most violent suburbs in South Africa.
Sentencing proceedings are usually very emotional. It was no different on Thursday, but those testifying felt that context was important in a society wracked with murders.
They said that while Lili may have said what he said to scare murderers, his actions on the ground are the very opposite in the suburbs where they see terrible violence.
Nomonde Noqazo, a member of the the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement, said when Lili made the comments in 2015, three people in the crowd were suspected of murdering a child. After his address, she said, Lili phoned the police and reported the individuals and they were arrested.
Noqazo said Lili was known as a peacemaker in volatile situations.
She testified that, once, a man hacked four relatives to death in a house near her. She called Lili for help when no else else would come out of their houses to help her intervene.
“He came. He tried to plead with that man through the window while a four-year-old child was apologising to him [the axe murderer]. [Lili] asked the father to stop, but he axed the child too,” she said.
The door was broken down and the murderer started drinking battery acid to kill himself.
By then, the community had come out and people wanted to kill the man, she said.
“Andile said nobody can take the law into their own hands. He said [the man] should go on to live with other people like him in Pollsmoor [Prison]. He asked a neighbour for milk and got [the man] to drink it,” she said.
The axe murderer stood trial and was sentenced to life in prison.
“What I am trying to say is that when something happens in the community and there are no police, people take the law into their own hands. Andile knows about this and has prevented people from taking the law into their own hands.”
A forthright woman up until that point, Noqazo became emotional when she spoke about the murder of her son, Siphiwe, the day before his final matric exam.
She said a group of people arrived at her house as she sat in mourning, preparing to take his body to the Eastern Cape for burial. They told her they were going to avenge Siphiwe’s death.
She called Lili and he called the local police commander. When she left for the Eastern Cape to bury her son, the four people suspected of Siphiwe’s murder were traced and arrested.
Next to testify was Nomlozi Ninini. She told the magistrate that her daughter, Bongiwe, was kidnapped and stabbed to death. Her body was found in a drain.
“The community was up in arms. They said they [the murderers] have to be found and they have to be killed. He [Lili] was the first one to phone the police,” Ninini said.
“The pain I was in, if I had met one [of the murderers] I would have killed them. The manner my child was killed … and she had done nothing.”
She said Lili and a woman named Justine traced the four suspects and the police arrested them.
Each time their court date came up, people would stand outside the homes of the four men’s parents and threaten to burn them down. However, Lili spread the word throughout the trial that everyone must keep the peace, Ninini said.
Bongiwe’s ex-boyfriend, Phumlani Nyewu, and his friends Masimthembe Solontsi, Melikhaya Mgushelo and Thabiso Balithoba got life sentences for her murder.
“Even now, nothing has ever happened to those houses,” she said.
She implored the magistrate to be lenient.
“We will be left with no saviour outside,” said Ninini
Proceedings continue on Friday.
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