HDIDCOTT J: If you happen to be a male "Bantu", to use the terminology still found in the legislation, you are governed by the Bantu (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act 25 of 1945 as amended from time to time. You are then an "idle person", once you are capable of being employed but have no lawful employment and have had none for a total of 122 days or more during the past year. Section 29 (2)(a)(i) makes you one. True, there are some exceptions. Your unemployment is not held against you if you are younger than 15, or as old as 65, or a pupil or student at an educational institution, or someonebona fideengaged in an officially approved business, trade, profession or "other remunerative activity", or a registered workseeker who has had no offer of lawfulAemployment for 122 days. Otherwise, however, it is, and your "idleness" is beyond question. It does not matter whether you actually need work and its rewards. Perhaps your family supports you adequately and is content to carry on doing so. That does not count. The section says so in as many words. Nor apparently do any other lawful means you may be fortunate enough to have. An official who has reason to believe that you belong to the class of "idle persons" may arrest you at any time and in any place outside a special "Bantu" area. You are then brought before a commissioner of the Department of Plural Relations and Development. He calls on you to give a "good and satisfactory account" of yourself, whatever that may be. UnlessCyou do manage to do so, he formally declares you to be an "idle person". Nobody is required to prove that you match the definition. You must prove you do not. Once you are officially "idle", all sorts of things can be done to you. Your removal to a host of places, and your detention in a variety of institutions, can be ordered. You can be banned forever from returning toDthe area where you were found, or from going anywhere else for that matter, although you may have lived there all your life. Whatever right to remain outside a special "Bantu" area you gained by birth, lawful residence or erstwhile employment is automatically lost. Perhaps you have never broken the law in your life, or harmed anyone, orEmade a nuisance of yourself by your activities or the lack of them. To complete our example, let us take that to be so. It makes no difference. When the commissioner has finished with you, the papers in your case go on review to a Judge of the Supreme Court. He is expected, if everything is in order, to certify that what happened to you appears to him to have been "in accordance with justice". The trouble is that it was not. It may have been in accordance with the legislation and, because what appears in legislation is the law, in accordance with that too. But it can hardly be said to have been "in accordance with justice". Parliament has the power to pass the statutes itGlikes, and there is nothing the Courts can do about that. The result is law. But that is not always the same as justice. The only way that Parliament can ever make legislation just is by making just legislation. I have before me the case of Jabulani Sydney Dube, an "idle person" by decree. The commissioner consigned him to a farm colony for two years, and suspended the order on condition that he either got employment within 30 days or left Durban of his own accord within 35 days. HDube is 24. He lives in Lamontville with his mother. Welfare funds support him. He is not a registered workseeker. Nor has he worked for some years. He would like to, so it seems. He is, however, an epileptic who suffers from frequent fits. One has not only his word for it. The district surgeon, having examined him, says the same, and adds that he is fit for nothing but light duties. He needs constant medication. King Edward VIII Hospital gives him pills and injections regularly.

The question is whether Dube is capable of being employed. If he is

What are the facts and the background of this case mentioned above?

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