Soldiers strip naked for job
Mpho Mokwape | Thursday July 17, 2014 10:59
Mpho Dubane’s lawyer says he was forced to strip naked in front of his colleagues at Pandamatenga and run about naked, before mimicking a gorilla. At the High Court, Dubane had asked for P120,000 which was declared excessive.
Yesterday, his lawyer, Yul Shara Moncho said the amount awarded by the High Court was “too little” looking at the “horrendous” acts military trainers inflicted on Dubane.
He said the acts impaired and lowered his client’s dignity and self-esteem “in an unimaginable way”.
Moncho argued that the High Court could have awarded compensatory damages and then made another award of punitive damages to show its displeasure at the trainers’ acts.
“The court should have at least awarded the claimed amount or a sum closer to it as compensatory damages and then make punitive damages on top to send warning bells as a deterrent measure to would-be wrong doers,” he argued.
He argued that the High Court’s award was “by no stretch of the imagination” a deterrent of any sort as it was too little to even compensate the emotional damage his client suffered.
While State lawyer, Otsile Rammidi, agreed that Dubane should not have been humiliated, he argued that the sum of P120,000 was excessive “for a man who only ran for a minute”.
“He should at least be given P27,000 and not the amount that he claimed because such things should be expected in military training,” Rammidi said.
However, Court of Appeal judges Ian Kirby, Alistair Abernethy and Steve Gaongalelwe, said it did not matter how long Dubane was asked to run naked because the bottom line was that he was humiliated. They cautioned the State against raising arguments around the amount of time spent running naked.
“You humiliated a man in front of 500 colleagues, stripped him of his dignity and you only say it was for a minute? I say it doesn’t matter how long it lasted; it was a humiliation of the worst kind,” said Abernethy.
For his part, Kirby said the original judgement should have considered the future consequences of the ordeal Dubane had suffered.
“Despite the judge saying that the counsel (Dubane’s lawyers) failed to provide similar case scenarios, I have to say it was unlikely for the counsel as this is a rare case. The case is very unusual and I agree he deserved more, as this is a humiliation to a man who might live with it for the rest of his life,” he said.
Gaongalelwe added that despite the State arguing that the incident happened during normal military training, Dubane’s case was the first time he had heard of a man stripping naked during training.
“It is humiliation of the worst kind and inhuman,” he said.
Judgment will be delivered on July 31.