Shaykh Isgaak Taliep, secretary-general, Muslim Judicial Council
The Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) mourns the passing of a dedicated individual in Imam Yaseen Harris.
Imam Yaseen was the youngest person elected as a member of the MJC and the first imam to be elected to its Imaarah (senior council). At the time of his passing, Imam Yaseen was 84 years old and held the position of chairman of the Imaarah and board member of the MJC Halaal Trust.
Imam Yaseen was born on October 11 1934 in Woodstock, two years later his father Imam Sulaiman established the Sulaimania Pre-School which served as the first madrassa in the area.
His father, in conjunction with the Woodstock congregation, bought a four-bedroomed house at 19 William Street and built a masjid on it.
At only 15 years old, Imam Yaseen was appointed as khalifa (teacher) of the madrassa and became the imam of the masjid upon his father’s death in 1963.
Imam matriculated from Livingstone High School and then pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree with an LLB specialisation but did not complete it. As with many Ulema at the time, imam did not go overseas to obtain a degree in Islam but rather studied under the tutelage of local scholars. Imam Yusuf Salie and Shaykh Abduragmaan Dollie taught imam the recitation of the Holy Qur’an while his father, Imam Sulaiman and Shaykh Moghammad Abbas Jassiem taught him Islamic studies.
Writer Jasmine Khan describes Imam Yaseen in the 2016 Kayfee edition, “I found it refreshing to hear from a man who is over 80 that one never stops learning.
“Unlike many who feel that they know it all, Imam Yaseen contends that his life is a constant search for knowledge that will benefit him as well as those he engages with.”
When his father became ill in 1958, Imam Yaseen took over his duties as imam at the Sulaimanyye Masjid, William Street, Woodstock.
He was also forced to work, as the family needed another income, and took up a position at Pepsi Cola Company as an accountant and later at Monviso Knitwear after the former disinvested in South Africa in protest of apartheid.
He worked at Monviso Knitwear from 1974 to 1984.
He was persuaded to leave Monviso to take up full-time employment at the MJC on the behest of the then MJC president, Shaykh Nazeem Mohamed.
Imam Yaseen had a long and loyal history with the MJC which started with his father, who was one of the founder members of the organisation in 1945.
Imam Yaseen assisted his father in administrative duties at the organisation and subsequently became the MJC’s youngest member at the age of 26.
He was the MJC’s first secretary-general and supervised halaal meat at Maitland Abattoir. When the MJC Halaal Trust was formalised in 1986, imam was one of the founding trustees as well as the director of the Halaal Trust until 2010, when he resigned due to ill health.
Imam Yaseen leaves behind his wife, Kamillah, three sons and one daughter.
May Allah Almighty grant Imam Yaseen Harris Jannah-tul Firdous (paradise) and sabr (patience) in the hearts of his family, colleagues and friends, Ameen.
Pertruska Hendricks, Lansdowne
It is with a warm heart that I write this letter to Lanscor Neighbourhood Watch in thanks and appreciation for all the sincere work that you do.
Many thanks for helping me on Tuesday November 6 when I reported my daughter missing at the police station.
It was the worst night of my life not knowing where my daughter was and a horrific experience having to fill out all sundries of forms at the police station and answering multiple questions.
However, it was comforting to see how the police officers and Lanscor Neighbourhood Watch work so closely together and hand in hand they were out looking for my daughter.
It is appreciated that there are good angels around who actually care about strangers (our family) and are willing to build a community.
Thank you so much for your commitment to the safeguarding of the community especially our children.
A special thank you to Rafique Foflonker, head of the Community Police Forum (CPF) for Lansdowne.
A sincere thank you to the Lansdowne and Wynberg police station for the dedicated commitment and service to the public. May God bless you abundantly and keep you safe.
PS. The CPF operates a volunteer counselling unit known as the Victim Empowerment Programme (VEP) in partnership with SAPS, who support victims or survivors of crime including basic intervention and mediation.
Lester September, chairman of the Forum of Cape Flats Civics’ steering committee
It seems the City of Cape Town is almost always in a constant state of turmoil and even in conflict with its own residents.
This time we have a governing party councillor claiming that the City of Cape Town and the provincial government are intent on perpetuating inequalities in Cape Town.
Grassroots civil society has some idea what is meant by this.
For quite some time, we in grassroots civil society have seen how the City is doing everything in its power to stop the reversing of apartheid spatial planning through the promotion of inner city and inner suburb affordable social housing.
Recently, former transport and urban development Mayco member, Brett Herron, said the City would be building houses all over Cape Town, through inverse densification (on the Cape Flats, Ottery, Philippi, Kraaifontein etc), even in the face of growing evidence that apartheid spatial planning, manifested in the sprawling Cape Flats, has contributed significantly to the water crisis and increasing costs to the City which we have to pay.
So besides the perpetuation of inequalities through the continued relegation of historically disadvantaged to the Cape Flats and other outlying areas, there is also an environmental and financial disaster that they seem intent on driving us towards.
Apartheid spatial planning relegated historically disadvantaged to the limits and outskirts of society, where they still remain, but the City of Cape Town, perpetuated the relegation of the poor and working class to the peripheries, where this has accelerated to such an extent over the past 10 to 11 years that Local Government, Environmental Affairs and Development Planning MEC Anton Bredell admits to Delft now having about 650 000 residents.
The City has become so adept at continuing where the Nats left off that nobody noticed that since 2006 it has been able to accelerate the replication of apartheid forced removals with more sophistication, subtlety and efficiency than the apartheid regime itself.
We also can’t see how the resignation of Patricia de Lille solves any of our problems when you have former mayor Dan Plato, who decimated municipal policing, taking over.
In 2007 Cape Town’s Metro police had about 2 000 municipal police; in October 2017, the City employed 385, thus we had a deficit of about 80% under safety and security Mayco member JP Smith’s watch.
While Mr Plato was mayor of Cape Town then, the City failed to invest in water augmentation and waste water recycling as per the Berg River Dam commissioning agreement. That played no small part in getting us into the water crisis we are still experiencing in the first place.
JP Smith, mayoral committee member for safety and security; and social services, responds: Lester September’s political petticoat is exposed in this outrageously inaccurate statement.
Dan Plato never took over municipal police in 2007. He has never been near the municipal police.
In 2006 a coalition government took over from an ANC-run municipality who had in fact decimated the service. Dumisani Ximbi (UDM) was the Mayco member until 2009 when I took over. The 2 000 figure he quotes is incorrect.
In 2000, before the establishment of the Metro police, there were 2 100 traffic and law enforcement officers across the six former municipal structures that then made up the Unicity or metro. After the establishment of the Metro police many of these staff were transferred to Metro police and there were further intakes of new officers increasing the number to around 2 500 by 2002.
After the ANC took over in 2002, the numbers were dramatically reduced and by 2006 when the DA took over the staff numbers had been reduced – 1 876 enforcement staff in Metro police (including traffic and law enforcement).
Since then the three services have been separated into traffic, law enforcement and Metro police and there are currently 2 982 staff across the three services.
The facts therefore are that after the DA initially built up the policing resources from 2 100 to almost 2 500, the ANC reduced it in four years to around 1 900 and the DA has since built it back up to just on 3 000.
There is a direct correlation between how long the DA is in power and how the policing numbers grow and how long the ANC is in power and how much the policing numbers fall. This is similar with the reduction in policing numbers within SAPS where the ANC have reduced the number of police in this province by 4 502 over the past four years.
As for Patricia de Lille, during the years which she held sway over the budget, there was very little growth in staff. The real staff growth happened under Helen Zille and Dan Plato between 2006 and 2010, especially in the run-up to the Fifa 2010 World Cup.
Limited staff growth happened between 2011 when Ms De Lille took over until this year where we have seen R66m staff growth, effectively the first year where the caucus had a say in the budgeting process. The most significant contribution to staff resources made by Ms De Lille when she was mayor was that she removed the budget for the stabilisation unit, effectively closing the unit after one year of its existence and forcing the safety and security directorate to shut down other staff posts to find the budget to save around one third of the former SU. Incoming mayor Dan Plato has committed to significant budget growth for policing over the next three years.
For your information, Mr Plato was a Mayco member in the Mayco of Helen Zille from 2006 until 2009 as Mayco member for housing, after which he took over as mayor in 2009 when Helen Zille left to become premier.
