June 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The South African Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which last week reached an agreement with the historic African National Congress (ANC) to form a government coalition that will keep Cyril Ramaphosa at the head of the Presidency, announced this Thursday that it is suspending one of his parliamentarians after the publication of several videos in which he uses racist and violent language against black people.
In one of the videos, Renaldo Gouws can be seen using a pejorative word used in the country against blacks during Apartheid and other racist insults, in addition to demanding that blacks “be killed”, which led his party to open a investigation.
Gouws later claimed that the videos had been manipulated, although the DA has ruled out this, as reported by the South African newspaper ‘Sowetan’. “The DA has determined that the video, in which Renaldo Gouws uses execrable language, is true,” he said.
For this reason, he stressed that “the federal executive of the DA has suspended Gouws, with immediate effect, while he faces disciplinary actions before the party’s federal legal commission”, after the parliamentarian apologized on Monday and stated that the video dates back to 2009, “when I was young and still a student.”
“I addressed the situation in 2016 and 2020 when the media asked me after being published on social networks,” he stated on his account on the social network the then youth leader (of the ACN, Julius) Malema sang songs about murdering people based on their race.”
“Before this and before these excerpts were publicly used against me, I posted a long statement on Facebook in 2013 apologizing for how I conveyed my message in my videos: angry, hostile, confrontational and rude,” he said. before stating that he is not “racist.”
In this sense, Gouws stressed that he is aware that “the message was distorted, with respect to the way in which it was transmitted.” “I take full responsibility for the actions of my younger, more immature self. I apologize, unreservedly,” she concluded in her statement.
In addition to that first video, a second recording has recently emerged on social networks in which he hinted that the white population of South Africa was suffering from apartheid and highlighted that “if Africa disappeared from the face of the earth, no one would care.” For this reason, tens of thousands of people joined an online petition to demand his dismissal.
The situation is a blow for the DA – founded in 2000 as a result of the Democratic Party, historically linked to the white minority opposed to Apartheid -, the second most voted party in the last elections, and the ANC, which lost its absolute majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of Apartheid in 1994 and was forced to reach a coalition agreement that has allowed Ramaphosa to be sworn in for a second term, something he did this Wednesday.
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