Renaldo Gouws support campaign removed from BackaBuddy as Elon Musk enters the Andile Mngxitama fray

Renaldo Gouws support campaign removed from BackaBuddy as Elon Musk enters the Andile Mngxitama fray

Crowdfunding platform Backabuddy has closed donations to a fundraising campaign in support of suspended Democratic Alliance MP Renaldo Gouws from its platform.

The campaign had raised R48 475 of its R100 000 goal when the decision was made to stop accepting money.

Backabuddy CEO Patrick Schofield told IOL that the fundraising campaign in support of Gouws had been under active discussion throughout the day on Tuesday.

“There is an internal review process that includes our campaign support and vetting teams which will usually make a direct decision. In a case like this the decision as to what action should be taken was then requested to include exco input,” he said. Schofield indicated that the campaign had been flagged very early after its initiation and after a review, the decision was made to close the campaign as it did not fit into Backabuddy’s terms and conditions.

Return to sender

Schofield indicated that the money would be returned to the donors.

“The donors associated with this campaign will be contacted and arrangements are being made to refund their donations in full.”

The highest single donation out of 78 unique donors was a R10 000 anonymous donation, with the comment “Cheers mate, I hope this helps your case, our case, be well.”

The crowdfunding campaign was set up by a user named Richard Dickson to cover “Renaldo Gouws’s legal bills against the SAHRC and also future legal bills with some of the mainstream media that knowingly misrepresented his words by only playing 15 seconds of a 6 minute video clip which they had access to but refused to publish in full.”

According to a statement posted on X, BackaBuddy said that “our platform’s policies enable campaigns to launch immediately. Once a campaign is live, the vetting and the validation of a campaign begins when funds start to be received.”

The backlash to the suspension of Renaldo Gouws by the Democratic Alliance has resulted in hate speech, threats, and intimidation of IOL staffers, management, ownership, and family members. Schofield said that this was one of the key factors that motivated them to freeze the Renaldo Gouws crowdfunding campaign.

“In our reasoning for taking it down (threats and intimidation) was very much a primary part of it. This campaign has directly resulted in hate speech and threats, hence being removed,” Schofield said to IOL.

Elon Musk enters the Mngxitama fray

Meanwhile, South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk has waded into the debate on race in South Africa.

Musk replied to two tweets with exclamation marks where a video of Mngxitama appears to exhorts followers at a 2018 rally to kill white people. In the clip that is recirculating on Twitter, he says “For each one person that is being killed, we kill five white people”.

Mngxitama: “we kill their women, we kill their children, we kill their dogs, we kill their cats, we kill anything that we find on our way.”

Many supporters of Renaldo Gouws have equivocated utterances by EFF leader Julius Malema and newly minted MK Party MP Andile Mngxitama with Gouws’ statements.

The supreme court of appeal ruled that Malema’s singing of struggle song “Dubul' ibhunu” does not constitute hate speech.

Andile Mngxitama was also cleared in 2023 of hate speech after Afriforum, a civil society organisation that advocates for mainly white Afrikaans South African rights, hauled him before the Equality Court.

The court ruled that "the complainants fell far short of presenting evidence" that such comments could be classified as hate speech given the guidelines outlined in the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act of 2002.

The language used by Gouws in his now viral video, particular the usage of the words “k*ffir” and “n*gger” are the issues that differentiate this case from Malema and Mngxitama’s cases.

Critics have pointed out that in Mngxitama’s case in particular the apparent incitement to violence against a class of people, while protected under freedom of speech, sets a very dangerous precedent, especially for low information easily mobilised groups of people who harbour racial grievances.

Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist” in the past promised to support the legal actions of people who were fired by their employees as a result of what they have said publicly on X, formerly Twitter.

IOL News