Excerpt: The Cape Peninsula baboons are running out of time. While the courts have spent months dealing with procedure, plans for capture, confinement and irreversible interventions have continued moving forward. But this case has now exposed something far bigger: the Western Cape Constitution created an independent Commissioner for the Environment — an office never properly operationalised, and which the DA-led Province has instead sought to remove. On Friday, 28 August 2026 at 10h00, LFN returns to the Western Cape High Court in a critical hearing that could determine how this fight proceeds. The baboons may have opened the door, but what lies behind it concerns environmental accountability across the entire Western Cape.

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What if we eventually win the court battle — but there are no free baboons left to save?

That is the frightening question now hanging over one of the most important environmental court cases unfolding in the Western Cape.

While legal papers have been filed, answered, opposed and delayed for months, life outside the courtroom has not stopped.

The plans affecting the Cape Peninsula baboons have continued moving forward.

The proposed sanctuary has moved closer to reality.

The Seaforth and Waterfall troops remain under threat of removal from the wild.

Reproductive interventions — including vasectomies — form part of the measures contemplated for affected baboons.

And once some of these things happen, a court cannot simply press an undo button.

A wild baboon troop that has been captured, subjected to irreversible reproductive procedures and permanently confined cannot simply be restored to exactly what it was before.

That is why Liberty Fighters Network (“LFN”) went to the Western Cape High Court in the first place.

And that is why what happens this Friday, 28 August 2026 at 10h00, matters enormously.

🐒 We are asking everyone who cares about these baboons, wildlife, our environment and accountable government to come to the Western Cape High Court and stand with us.

Not because Friday will finally decide every issue in the baboon case.

It won’t.

Friday is about something that has now become another obstacle standing directly in the path of the bigger case:

Who should continue presiding over it, and how do we get this case moving again before events outside the courtroom make the court battle meaningless?

The Court has directed that LFN’s urgent application asking Holderness J to recuse herself — in ordinary language, to step away from further involvement in the case — will be heard on Friday at 10h00 in open court.

That may sound like another technical legal dispute.

It isn’t.

To understand why, we need to go back to the beginning.

This case started with one simple objective: do not do the irreversible things first

LFN did not approach the High Court in February asking it to decide overnight exactly how every baboon on the Cape Peninsula should be managed.

Our immediate request was much simpler:

Do not allow permanent things to happen while the bigger legal questions are still waiting to be decided.

The urgent application specifically sought to prevent measures including:

• capture, removal, relocation or confinement of baboon troops;
• vasectomies and other reproductive interventions;
• euthanasia or lethal control;
• agreements concerning baboon sanctuaries or enclosures; and
• construction or installation of sanctuary infrastructure.

Those measures appear from the judgment itself.

Think about it in ordinary terms.

If government wants to demolish a historic building and a court challenge says the demolition may be unlawful, there is little point in the court deciding six months afterwards that the challengers were right.

The building is already gone.

Exactly the same danger exists here.

That is why time has never been a side issue in this case.

Time is part of the case.

We lost the first urgent round — but that did not end the fight

Holderness J heard LFN’s urgent application on 19 February 2026 and delivered judgment on 25 February 2026.

The urgent protection we sought was refused.

LFN disagreed with important parts of that judgment and, only days later, on 2 March 2026, filed an Application for Leave to Appeal.

In ordinary language, we asked for permission to take the judgment further so that another court could consider whether it was wrong.

That application still has not been heard.

More than five months later.

And this is where the story becomes extremely difficult to accept.

The case was urgent precisely because we warned that permanent things could happen to the baboons while litigation continued.

Yet the process that could open the door to an appeal has remained stalled while implementation of the disputed programme has continued outside the courtroom.

The recusal papers record that the appellate process remained stalled for more than five months while the environmental programme moved from planning towards implementation.

That is not simply an inconvenience to LFN.

The passage of time itself can decide the dispute before another court ever gets the opportunity to do so.

Imagine winning after the baboons have already lost

Suppose another court eventually agrees with us.

Suppose it finds that serious legal issues should have been considered differently.

Suppose it ultimately concludes that the urgent protection should have been granted.

Wonderful.

But suppose that by then the Seaforth troop has already been captured.

Suppose reproductive procedures have already taken place.

Suppose the animals have already been permanently moved into an enclosure.

What exactly would we have won?

A judgment?

Because we may already have lost the very thing the judgment was supposed to protect.

Government officials can return to their offices after a delayed court case.

Lawyers can open another file.

Courts can allocate another date.

The baboons cannot recover months or years of their lives, undo a sterilisation or reverse every consequence of permanent confinement.

That is why delay matters so much.

So where does Friday’s recusal application fit into the story?

LFN is asking Holderness J to step away from further involvement in this matter.

Not simply because she ruled against us.

Judges rule against litigants every day. Losing a case does not automatically establish bias.

Our concern comes from the combined history of what happened in the judgment and what happened afterwards.

The judgment did not merely reject our urgent application.

It opened by saying that “Litigation is not a game”, described LFN and myself through previous unrelated litigation, referred to us as “serial litigants”, and said that I appeared intent on treating the courts as a “playground”.

Our concerns about the judgment were not invented in August.

They were already raised when LFN filed its Application for Leave to Appeal on 02 March 2026.

Then the case continued.

The appeal application did not move.

Dates were contemplated and passed.

The parties were informed on 1 June 2026 that the leave application would be heard from the week commencing 27 July 2026, after the outstanding costs issue had first been dealt with.

That week also came and went.

Attempts were then made to obtain administrative intervention so that the case could move.

Eventually, SANParks itself took the position that if LFN sought Holderness J’s recusal, a formal recusal application had to be brought.

So that is exactly what we did.

Friday therefore asks a serious but straightforward question:

After the entire history of this matter, should Holderness J continue exercising the remaining judicial functions in a case in which LFN says a reasonable member of the public could now apprehend that impartiality may be compromised?

That is the recusal issue.

But there is an awful trap here too

If the recusal application fails, LFN may have further legal remedies.

But appealing a refusal to recuse could itself take more time.

And while another court considers which judge should hear the case, implementation of the Baboon Action Plan may continue.

That creates a ridiculous circle.

Fight immediately about recusal — and perhaps spend more months litigating while the baboons are captured.

Continue with the main process — and risk an argument later that we accepted the judge continuing.

LFN has expressly placed that dilemma before the Court.

We refuse to allow a procedural dispute about who hears the case to destroy the reason the case was brought in the first place.

The baboons remain the emergency.

Meanwhile, the sanctuary is not waiting for the courts

This is perhaps the most alarming part.

While litigation has moved slowly, events outside the courtroom have not.

By July, public reporting recorded that the City had secured a three-year operating budget for its first baboon sanctuary.

Further reporting records that planning and site preparation for the Kogelfontein enclosure were actively moving forward.

And the Cape of Good Hope SPCA has publicly stated that it does not support the placement of free-ranging, wild-caught baboons into a sanctuary as a long-term management solution.

That is hardly a trivial objection.

Meanwhile, an alternative proposal involving strategic fencing around Simon’s Town has also been publicly advocated.

There are therefore real debates about alternatives.

But permanent confinement threatens to settle those debates not through consensus, science or final judicial determination —

but simply by getting there first.

Many baboon protectors apparently don’t even know this court case already exists

The message circulated amongst baboon protectors this week exposes another serious problem.

Some concerned residents apparently believe that somebody still has to start an urgent High Court case to prevent the Seaforth troop from being captured, sterilised and confined.

That case already exists.

The very interventions now frightening residents were placed before the Western Cape High Court in February.

That does not mean other people have no right to act.

They absolutely do.

Nor does it mean LFN owns this cause.

We don’t.

The baboons belong to nobody. Their protection belongs to everybody.

But duplication, isolation and groups refusing to communicate with one another will not save these animals.

The authorities have professional officials.

They have legal departments.

They have attorneys.

They have counsel.

They have institutional budgets.

Civil society cannot compete by fragmenting itself into ten camps that barely speak to each other.

We need cooperation.

We need evidence.

We need experts.

We need residents who know these troops.

We need scientists.

We need animal-welfare organisations.

We need journalists.

And we need ordinary people prepared to stand up.

The baboons do not care whose logo appears on the victory.

They need a victory.

Then our baboon case uncovered something much bigger

And this is the part of the story that should make every person in the Western Cape sit upright.

While investigating environmental accountability in this matter, LFN came face to face with an extraordinary fact.

The Constitution of the Western Cape itself creates an independent:

COMMISSIONER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT.

Not an activist group.

Not a private organisation.

Not something invented by LFN.

A constitutional environmental watchdog.

Sections 71 to 77 of the Western Cape Constitution provide for this office.

Amongst other things, the Commissioner is supposed to investigate complaints concerning environmental administration and make recommendations to provincial organs of state and municipalities.

Now ask yourself an obvious question:

Where was that Commissioner when controversy erupted over the Cape Peninsula baboons?

The answer is astonishing.

There wasn’t one.

The office has never been properly operationalised.

The Western Cape Government’s own current documentation admits that the Commissioner “has not yet been appointed”.

And this is where the story becomes political.

The DA’s Commissioner problem: first don’t appoint one — then try to delete the office

The Democratic Alliance has governed the Western Cape for many years.

Its government frequently speaks about constitutionalism, accountable government, the rule of law and doing things differently from governments elsewhere in South Africa.

Those are admirable standards.

But standards are meaningful only when you apply them to yourself.

The Commissioner for the Environment is not an ANC invention being imposed upon the DA.

It appears in the Western Cape’s own Constitution.

Yet the office has remained unfilled.

And instead of finally making the constitutional watchdog operational, a constitutional amendment process was launched to repeal the provisions relating to the Commissioner altogether.

That is not LFN’s description of the Bill.

The Western Cape Provincial Parliament itself describes the purpose of the Constitution of the Western Cape First Amendment Bill [B1–2021] as including:

“to repeal the provisions regarding the Commissioner for the Environment”.

And the Provincial Parliament’s current Bill tracker still records that Bill as “Introduced” — not as an enacted constitutional amendment.

So the Commissioner remains part of the constitutional framework while the Province’s own 2025/26 documentation still records that the Commissioner has not been appointed.

Think about that sequence.

A constitutional safeguard is created.

It is not made operational.

Years pass.

Then government argues that other environmental laws and institutions make it unnecessary.

And instead of testing what an independent Commissioner could actually do for the public, government seeks to remove the office from the Constitution.

That is the contradiction the DA must answer.

And the baboons demonstrate exactly why an independent Commissioner might matter

This case could scarcely provide a better real-world example.

We have three governmental entities operating through a Joint Task Team.

We have disputed environmental management decisions.

We have questions about responsibility and authority.

We have angry communities.

We have competing scientific views.

We have serious animal-welfare concerns.

We have disagreements over fencing versus confinement.

We have allegations and counter-allegations concerning implementation.

We have public money being spent.

And we have citizens asking:

Who independently investigates all of this?

The Western Cape Constitution already contemplated an answer.

The Commissioner for the Environment.

And the chair in that office is empty.

That is why the baboons are the gateway to something much bigger.

They have exposed what happens when the public suddenly needs a constitutional safeguard that successive provincial governments never made operational.

DA leadership now has a choice

The Democratic Alliance cannot fairly say that all of this has nothing to do with it.

The City of Cape Town is DA-led.

The Western Cape Government is DA-led.

CapeNature is a provincial public entity. Its Board is appointed by the Provincial Minister responsible for environmental affairs, and CapeNature itself records that its Board must perform its functions subject to directives issued by that Minister.

SANParks is a national entity and therefore cannot simply be commanded by the DA.

That distinction matters.

But two of the three governmental authorities making up the Baboon Management Joint Task Team sit within spheres where the DA exercises enormous political influence.

If the national DA leadership, the Western Cape leadership and the City leadership decided today that no irreversible action should occur until the present legal crisis is resolved, that intervention could fundamentally change what happens next.

They could publicly call for a pause.

They could urgently engage their own political executives.

They could require explanations from the relevant City structures.

The Provincial Minister could exercise whatever lawful oversight and directive powers are available concerning CapeNature.

They could insist that their representatives seek agreement within the Joint Task Team that no baboon is subjected to an irreversible intervention while the litigation remains caught in procedural battles.

And they could engage SANParks at political level and ask it to join that pause.

That could happen without waiting another five months for a court hearing.

So we now address the DA leadership directly:

You do not have to agree with LFN.

You do not have to concede the court case.

You do not even have to agree that the sanctuary is ultimately unlawful.

But you can surely agree that free-ranging wild animals should not be subjected to potentially irreversible interventions while a genuine constitutional and environmental dispute remains unresolved.

Pause the implementation.

Allow the courts to do their work.

Allow the alternatives to be properly tested.

And stop forcing the baboons to carry the consequences of a legal and political dispute they did not create.

And voters are entitled to remember what happens next

LFN is apolitical.

We do not exist to campaign for political parties.

But being apolitical does not mean remaining silent when a governing party must be held politically accountable.

The DA regularly asks South Africans to judge it on governance.

Very well.

This is governance.

The treatment of the Cape Peninsula baboons is governance.

The decision whether to pause irreversible action is governance.

The failure to operationalise a constitutional environmental watchdog is governance.

Attempting to repeal that watchdog before it was ever properly allowed to function is governance.

And political accountability ultimately belongs to the public.

Every voter is therefore entitled to ask the DA:

Why should we trust your promises about constitutionalism if a constitutional environmental institution in the Province you govern can remain dormant for decades?

Why should we trust your environmental credentials if this baboon crisis cannot even persuade you to pause irreversible measures while the courts are still dealing with the dispute?

Why seek to remove the Commissioner instead of first allowing the Commissioner to do the job the Constitution created it to perform?

Those are questions the DA should answer before asking Western Cape residents for their political support again.

And where were the other political parties?

There is another uncomfortable part of this story.

LFN sought to involve political parties because the Western Cape Constitution itself gives political parties a role in the process through which a Commissioner for the Environment is nominated and approved.

Our proposed amendment identified the parties represented in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament.

LFN records that, in its actual engagement around this cause, the Cape Independence Party has been the only political party that positively showed support.

We acknowledge that.

It does not mean that LFN endorses the Cape Independence Party or its wider political programme.

It means something much simpler:

When support was needed on this issue, they showed some.

The others are entitled to explain their own positions.

And the DA, as the governing party of both the Province and the City, has far more than a spectator’s role.

So Friday is about much more than the recusal of a judge

Friday is about whether this case can finally begin moving again.

It is about whether justice still has value when delay can destroy the thing a court is being asked to protect.

It is about whether ordinary citizens can meaningfully challenge powerful organs of state.

It is about whether constitutional promises are real or merely decorative words on paper.

It is about whether the Western Cape should finally have the independent environmental watchdog its Constitution provides for.

And immediately —

it is about keeping wild baboons wild long enough for those questions actually to be decided.

WE NEED YOU AT COURT

The hearing is in open court.

🐒 Baboon protectors.

🌿 Environmentalists.

🐾 Animal-welfare organisations.

⚖️ Constitutional activists.

📸 Journalists and photographers.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Residents and ordinary members of the public.

Come.

You don’t need to belong to LFN.

You don’t need to agree with everything we say.

Come because public justice should happen in front of the public.

FRIDAY, 28 AUGUST 2026

10H00

WESTERN CAPE HIGH COURT

MADAM JUSTICE HOLDERNESS

35 KEEROM STREET, CAPE TOWN

CASE NO. 2026-024184

Please arrive early enough to pass through security and establish the courtroom allocated for the hearing.

The baboons cannot walk into the High Court and demand their own protection.

The Commissioner for the Environment cannot intervene because nobody occupies the office.

That leaves us.

The public.

And right now silence is the one thing these baboons cannot afford.

🐒🌿⚖️

Liberation Greetings

LIBERTY FIGHTERS NETWORK

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