The Governor of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) Lesetja Kaganyago is suing Nelson Mandela Bay councillor Andile Lungisa for allegedly calling him the K-word.
The African National Congress (ANC) councillor shared a photo of Kganyago’s court papers on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon.
He accompanied the photo with a caption that dismissed the court action as “counter-revolutionary lawfare.”
We have entered the realm of the absurd. The governor of the Reserve Bank is suing me for R500k because I correctly characterized him and his ilk as useful idiots of settler capital. CounterRevolutionaryLawfare [Sic].
Andile Lungisa
Lungisa’s ‘defamatory’ tweets
Kganyago is seeking R500,000 in damages from Lungisa over two tweets the latter posted in June this year.
In one tweet which has since been deleted, Lungisa allegedly called Kganyago “an exceptional k****r.”
He like many of his ilk, imagines that proximity to the culturally fetid but economically dominant neo-settlers coupled with a few lattes makes him an exceptional k****r.
Andile Lungisa
In the second tweet, Lungisa called the Governor a “dutiful servant of our racialist classes.”
Lesetja Kganyago, a dutiful servant of our racialist classes supérieures, is an ardent disciple of the neoliberal dystopia that has condemned millions of African people to a desolate existence. [Sic]
Andile Lungisa
Lungisa apparently posted the tweets after Kganyago termed those calling for the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank “barbarians at the gate of SARB.”
Kganyago’s arguments
In his court papers, Kganyago said Lungisa’s tweets were “wrong and defamatory.”
He said the tweets suggested that he was a “lackey of racist people” who did their bidding.
The tweets further suggested that Kganyago doesn’t care about South Africa’s poor as long as he’s accepted by “racist supremacists,” the Governor argued.
Speaking to HeraldLIVE, Lungisa vowed to oppose the lawsuit because he “simply returned insults with facts.”