Politically-charged Ingonyama Trust case delayed
A politically-charged court case involving millions of rands in rent paid to a trust headed by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has been postponed at the last moment, says a GroundUp report.
The Ingonyama Trust has been accused of ‘extorting’ rent from rural communities in KZN, without their informed and genuine consent. The case was set down to be argued tomorrow in the KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) when lawyers acting for the residents hoped to raise questions over how millions in rent collections by the Ingonyama Trust Board have been spent recently.
The sole trustee of the Ingonyama Trust is King Goodwill Zwelithini.
But Judge Peter Olsen has informed the parties in the matter that KZN Judge President Achmat Jappie had decided that because of the serious issues to be decided in the case, the matter should now be heard by a full Bench.
The matter would have to be set down for two days, as the risk of it becoming part-heard by a full Bench would become difficult to manage as more than one judge’s schedule would now be involved.
The case could therefore not be heard tomorrow, nor during the current session which ends next month, suggesting the matter will only be heard next year.
Olsen indicated that a request for televised coverage of the case would also have to be considered by the full Bench in due course.
The decision surprised Lawson Naidoo, executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, one of the main parties to the case, who said he was shocked to hear of the delay.
‘Why wait for the eleventh-hour to announce this when this case was set down for hearing months and months ago? We don’t understand that, and at the very least, we would have expected to have been given an opportunity to make representations before the decision (to postpone) was made,’ Naidoo is quoted as saying by GroundUp.
According to court papers, the Ingonyama Trust received more than R106m from residential and commercial leases during 2017 alone on rural land controlled by the Trust.
Article disclaimer: While we have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this article, it is not intended to provide final legal advice as facts and situations will differ from case to case, and therefore specific legal advice should be sought with a lawyer.
