Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
In fact, as I argued last week, what they are trying to do, with some success, is to impose a counterreality in which the sins of apartheid are being erased by the sins, failures and weaknesses of the African National Congress (ANC). The intention is to erase the racism of the past and present with the corruption, lack of delivery, moral degeneration and the pursuit of narrow individual interests which, for reasons I will unpack in another article, form part of the dominant narrative in South African politics and radio talk shows. In other words, apartheid was not so bad after all. And because apartheid was not so bad after all, as evidenced by the unbridled racism of those who respond online to columns and articles that are published in this newspaper, the arrogance of some white people has itself become a significant component of this dominant narrative. – Aubrey Matshiqi in Business Day
