By Siyabonga Mkhwanazi | IOL |
EFF leader Julius Malema’s court appearance in Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal has been postponed to July 4.
EFF spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said on Friday the appearance took less than five minutes before it was postponed.
He said this was the waste of the court’s time.
Malema was charged for inciting violence after he urged people to invade unoccupied land.
He is still to appear before the Bloemfontein Magistrate’s court on a similar charge.
The charges in both in the Newcastle and Bloemfontein cases relate to comments the EFF leader made when he was in Bloemfontein.
Malema and the EFF have challenged the validity of the charges as he was charged under an apartheid-era law.
The EFF has said the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 is unconstitutional and should be removed from the statute books.
The EFF has also asked Parliament to scrap all apartheid laws that have not scrapped since 1994.
In a meeting of the programming committee in Parliament a few weeks ago legal advisers for the institution said they were looking at all laws passed before 1994. They said they found that there were more than 1 800 such pieces of legislation, but not all of them would have to be scrapped.
This was the argument advanced by Justice Minister Michael Masutha in Parliament late last year during a debate on the matter. He said in some laws only certain provisions would have to be removed to align them with the constitution.
But, he said, there was no need to completely remove hundreds of laws from the statute books without verifying each and every piece of legislation.
