Police to take all the administrative and other steps
necessar y to ensure that neither Lt. Col. Ga ffoor nor any
other member of the police service participated in such
harassment or intimidation. The Minister and Lt. Col.
Ga ffoor now apply for leave to appeal against my decision.
At the outset of his argument, I put to Mr Mathibedi,
who appeared together with Ms Jaga for the Minister and for
Lt. Col. Gaf foor, that the application for leave to appeal had
left unchallenged five critical factual conclusions I drew in
paragraph 17 of my judgment .
The first of these was that two of the messages that I
found to be harassing and intimidatory were sent to Mr and
M rs Mamiane from a number linked to Lt. Col. Ga ffoor. The
second fact I found was that all the messages referred to
cases lodged by Mr Mamiane, apparently against the author
of the messages. The third fact I found was that one of the
messages refers to its author as “GAFFOOR” , which is of
course Lt. Col. Gaf foor's surname. The fourth fact I found
is that one of the messages refers to Mr Mamiane being
followed from Parkview where Lt. Col. Gaf foor is stationed.
The fifth fact I found is that one of messages refers directly
to court action in circumstances where Mr Mamiane had
recently obtained a protection order against Lt. Col.
Gaf foor .
Despite his helpful submissions, Mr Mathibedi was
unable to point to any aspect of the application for leave to
appeal which squarely challenged any one of these five
factual findings. It seems to me that if those five findings
are left unchallenged, there are no prospects of success on
appeal.
Any prospect of success there may be is particularly
weak given that the applicants wish to appeal against a
conclusion of fact I drew after hearing oral evidence. T he
test on appeal in these circumstances is not merely whether
the trial court was wrong but whether the trial court's
factual conclusions were clearly wrong in the sense that
they could not be justified in light of other facts that the
trial court found or which appear from the record itself.
Courts of appeal generally do not interfere with factual
conclusions drawn by trial courts after all evidence has
been led and probabilities, credibilities and reliability have
been assessed.
For those two reasons, being the absence of any
challenge to the conclusions drawn in paragraph 17 of my
judgment and the stringent test to be met in an appeal
against a finding of fact, the appeal proposed stands no
prospect of success.
Accordingly –
1. The application for leave to appeal against my
judgment and order of 4 September 2025 is dis missed;