Johnathan Paoli
THE Democratic Alliance (DA) Federal Council has officially suspended Member of Parliament (MP) Renaldo Gouws, following the verification of his videos, previously alleged to be faked and created through Artificial Intelligence (AI), where he can be seen and heard uttering racist rants.
On Thursday, DA Director of Communications Richard Newton said the party’s top executive confirmed the authenticity of videos involving Gouws in which he uses racial slurs to illustrate his discontentment with struggle songs and Black Economic Empowerment.
“The DA has established that the video, in which Renaldo Gouws uses execrable language, is in fact genuine and not a fake as initially suspected,” Newton said adding that the DA Federal Executive has suspended Gouws with immediate effect while he faces disciplinary charges before the party’s Federal Legal Commission.
Earlier this week, a video from 2009 showingGouws expressing anger and racial slurs about how he was a victim of “reverse apartheid” and that the words “boer” or farmer was the equivalent of violent terms used to dehumanise Afrikaners.
Gouws has been rising within the DA and previously served as a ward councillor in Nelson Mandela bay, and was recently appointed as MP following the national and provincial elections.
Last year Gouws attempted to apply for a protection order against activist Bianca Van Wyk who called him out on social platform X for being racist, sexist and homophobic.
The interim protection subsequently collapsed and the court found that he had acted in bad faith and had not disclosed his own actions in his application.
DA Federal Chair Helen Zille had previously said that his career would be finished, but initially she did not believe the videos were real, and suggested they were rather AI-generated in an attempt to undermine party members.
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