Fadiel Adams, spokesperson for controversial new organisation Gatvol Capetonian, says they are calling for “all people not born in the Western Cape pre-94 to sell their assets and go home”.
When accused by interviewer Jane Dutton of only aiming at black people with this call, Adams said: “I don’t know what the demographic is, but if it is, so be it.”
Adams and his organisation believe the so-called coloured community in the Western Cape is “growing exponentially poorer as a direct result of the influx from the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape”.
Of the largely black Eastern Cape community that is based in the Western Cape, Adams says: “They are a strain on the infrastructure. Our trains aren’t riding because they weren’t designed to cope with this amount of people.” He also said queues were now too long in hospitals.
Asked by Dutton if he was using the same rhetoric that had landed Helen Zille in trouble back when she said that those coming from the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape were “refugees”, Adams replies: “I very, very rarely agree with Helen Zille, but on this day, I will.”
Adams believes that so-called coloured Capetonians are overlooked for jobs in favour of black South Africans.
READ MORE: Khoi-San king declares that the Cape has seceded from SA
“Last time I read the Freedom Charter, it said that South Africa belongs to all who live in it,” he says, adding these days, that does apply, “except if you live in the Western Cape and happen to be brown”.
Adams also confirmed the organisation was fighting for secession. “We want an independent Western Cape,” he said. “We’ve been made to feel apart from the rest of the country anyway. We might as well pack up, close our borders and have our own country.
“We can show the rest of South Africa how the democracy project is supposed to work,” he adds, saying that in his vision for the Western Cape “white, black, brown and Indian people will benefit”.
READ MORE: The only good politician is a dead politician, says Gatvol Capetonian
He stresses that his organisation’s call for people to leave the Western Cape does not apply to black people, but to “anyone not born in the province pre-94”.
He claims that if those causing what he sees as problems in the Western Cape were to be Indian or white, “my attitude would be the same”.
Asked whether he thinks his organisation is stoking racial tension, Adams says: “We have to rise up – no one else is going to do it for us.”
He countered allegations of racism by saying: “Racism is practiced against us every day.”
“We’ve swapped an oppressor,” he adds, repeating the organisation’s controversial view that the ANC government is as bad as the apartheid government was.
“We, the so-called coloureds, liberated the Western Cape,” he adds, reinforcing his calls for his people to reject what he sees as disenfranchisement in the province.
Gatvol Capetonian are not the only ones to call for Western Cape independence.
The Citizen reported on July 17 that Khoisan king Khoebaha Calvin Cornelius III announced in a video that he had already seceded “the Cape” from the rest of the country.
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