Mr Neelan Karikan, President of the Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa.
Mr Neelan Karikan · Founder & President of the Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa · Senior Magistrate and
District Court Judge
Dear colleagues, and hello again to the attorneys, advocates, prosecutors, traditional leaders, court staff and families who share the wooden benches with us.
August’s first edition travelled further than we expected. Magistrates wrote from rooms with dead recording machines. Attorneys wrote from passages where a spoliation had been argued as if it were an eviction. A prosecutor wrote to say the tea-break cartoon had been pinned to a notice board. That is the point of a newsletter that is allowed to be human.
This second edition keeps the furniture you already know — a President’s note, a case-law drawer, a page you can write on, footnotes that can be checked — and changes the subject-matter. We deal with the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office-Bearers, with the mental cost of the roll, with the mandament van spolie as it actually arrives on a Monday, with the Magistrates’ Commission, and with the Madlanga Commission that the country cannot stop watching. We also print a finished member article: Magistrate Tebogo Mokgatle of Tshitale on S v Twai and S v Molefe,
and the first-appearance bench that has already seen a section 60(11B) form. We make room for the animals who never get a paragraph on a charge sheet unless a magistrate insists. We do not try anyone on these pages. We do tell our members how to sit while the country does.
Most of all we ask you to write back. This edition already prints one member. Magistrate Mokgatle sent the article. Send the next one. Send the feeling you cannot put in a judgment. Send a published piece and we will say where it first appeared. Issue 03 is still a drawer waiting for your envelope.
“Whether you resign or retire, we are still accountable as judicial officers. High Court judges are judges for life. It is the same cloth.”
— Mr Karikan, Newzroom Afrika, 1 June 2026