Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
On bad faith
The correct approach to determining the existence of bad faith is therefore one that recognises that bad faith exists only when the office-bearer acted with the specific intent to deceive, harm or prejudice another person or by proof of serious or gross recklessness that reveals a breakdown of the orderly exercise of authority so fundamental that absence of good faith can be reasonably inferred and bad faith presumed. This is so because the mischief sought to be rooted out by rendering bad faith so severely punishable, particularly within the public sector space, is to curb abuse of office which invariably has prejudicial consequences for others.
