It is worrying that there are increasingly desperate and shrill attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the IEC by making unsubstantiated and spurious allegations to raise public suspicion about its impartiality and honesty.
The decision by the Electoral Court to overturn the decision by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) that Jacob Zuma was not eligible to contest a seat in Parliament came as somewhat of a surprise. (more…)
Whether Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula remains Speaker of the National Assembly is not a legal matter. Neither is it a matter of […]
Apart from the odd statement demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, South African universities have, by and large, remained silent about […]
The (at the very least) incestuous practice of appointing all-male and all-white legal teams breeds (or perpetuates) a special kind […]
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.