A spitting fire #OperationFiyela convert Felicia Chauke has berated the SAPS in Alexandra for ‘conniving with foreign hawkers and allowing them to call the shots in the township at the expense of bonafide residents’.
She was speaking in an interview with Alex News on the steps of the Alexandra Magistrate’s Court where their comrades, the Fiyela 4 were applying for bail following a citizen’s arrest of their comrades by a group of Mozambican nationals at Pan Africa Square on March 31.
“I have never heard of a country and its political leaders and government system that goes out of its way to court foreigners at the expense of its own people that it claims to have fought and some died to free them from clutches of a diabolic system of apartheid. “
But here we are just under 30 years ago, all the noble deeds and work done to free us from apartheid are being trampled upon by SAPS members in the township who are conniving with foreign hawkers and allowing them to call the shots at the expense of bonafide residents,” Chauke claimed.
Chauke said she was disappointed that Alex SAPS members had ‘clubbed and connived’ with foreign hawkers to harass residents who had held a stakeholder meeting with them. She said the meeting included other law enforcement agencies and various community organisations prior to the fiyela protest to voice their concerns about the ‘hijacking of the Pan Africa Square by foreign hawkers’.
“Why do they allow our members to be beaten and manhandled by foreigners right under their watch? We as fiyela we are not allowed to make a citizen’s arrest but these foreigners are.
“We’re told not to take the law into our own hands but we have just witnessed foreigners taking the law into their own hands under the nose of SAPS members. These foreigners brazenly declare war on us, saying ‘akufiwe makufiwa’ and ‘makuliwe makuliwa’ [they will fight to the death if need be],” Chauke claimed.
But the commander of the Alexandra Police Station Brigadier Lindiwe Magudulela denied that police were conniving with foreign hawkers. “We [SAPS] have a right to call upon assistance even from a person in the street to help us apprehend a suspect who is resisting arrest,” she said.
On allegations that foreign hawkers took the law into their own hands by beating and manhandling fiyela members, Magudulela said she had no knowledge of that but that most of those issues will be ventilated in a court of law.
