SACP condemns Bitou deputy executive mayor Nokuzola Kolwapi’s reckless discharging of firearm during initiates’ homecoming celebration
SACP Communications
South African Communist Party
SACP condemns Bitou deputy executive mayor Nokuzola Kolwapi’s reckless discharging of firearm during initiates’ homecoming celebration
Tuesday, 23 December 2025: - The South African Communist Party (SACP) unequivocally condemns the reckless discharging of a firearm by Bitou Local Municipality deputy executive mayor Nokuzola Kolwapi during a celebration ceremony of homecoming of initiates in the Western Cape.
South African society is plagued by high rates of violence, specifically gun violence, and a public display of guns only serves to publicise and legitimise the idea of violence associated with guns, in addition to risking the lives and safety of those within the vicinity of the recklessly used firearm.
The statement released by Kolwapi claiming that the gun was a toy gun shooting blanks and that it had no ammunition to cause harm to the members of the community cannot exonerate her from such irresponsibility. Her conduct was a glorification of gun violence, and was even performed within the vicinity of children, who must always be protected from such violence.
Guns are not toys to be used for public spectacles but are tools for law enforcement and security provision in accordance with appropriate regulations. The young men’s rite of passage is a sanctified process and tradition and is not to be associated with violence.
The use of guns is strictly regulated according to South African laws to prevent reckless use of guns thereby endangering the people. While guns are permissible for private use, there are rules applicable in that context and those rules exclude the conduct of the deputy mayor. The Firearms Control Act categorises ownership of a gun as a privilege and not a right and that privilege comes with strict responsibility. The gun ownership laws require that one be a fit and proper person in order to own and use a gun. This is in the interests of community safety. Kolwapi’s conduct is not that of a fit and proper person nor that of a person who acknowledges gun ownership as a privilege.
The misfortune of this event is exacerbated by the position of the person concerned as a leader of government at a local level. The responsibility of leadership is protection and setting a good example for personal conduct for those they lead. Leadership is a moral obligation that surpasses personal entitlements that each individual may perceive of themselves. The people who are victims of gun violence, legitimised by the conduct of the deputy mayor, are primarily the working class who live in unguarded communities with no personal security provision, unlike the case with privileged individuals. To that end, this act is as insensitive as it is devoid of moral integrity for an individual of such responsibility.
South Africa has a particularly traumatic history of guns used in the proliferation of near genocide conditions in the political era towards our 1994 democratic breakthrough. Kolwapi’s gun use as a public spectacle represents arrogance and insensitivity to the pain and suffering of the people of South Africa who died in large numbers in the early and mid-1990s. As the SACP, we find it even more despicable that the deputy mayor hopes to justify her illegal conduct by mischievously affixing a gender connotation to this dreadful act, in a desperate ploy to explain away the illegal conduct. Women are the victims of gun violence at a high rate and as the SACP we recognise that the actions of the deputy mayor undermine women’s struggle and progress.
We call on law enforcement authorities to take appropriate actions to sanction and correct this behaviour.