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
"Juan Duval Uys" finally arrested
He was a creature of his fax machine and lazy journalists who never checked any of the outlandish claims he regularly made until he finally went too far by claiming that members of his non-existent Gay and Lesbian Alliance were going to donate blood and give false information about their sexual histories and orientation.
He did many stupid and bad things but he would not have been able to do it all and get the attention he so obviously craves, if he was not enabled by the media. Despite warnings from many of us, they kept quoting him as if there really was a Gay and Lesbian Alliance and as if he was credible person. Quoting Uys was like quoting Max the Gorilla – highly entertaining and good for circulation but with no relation to reality.
It makes one wonder about all the stories that appear in the papers regarding the ANC succession race and the alleged conspiracies on all sides. It seems if one has a contact at the newspaper one could get almost anything published no matter how preposterous or untrue.
UPDATE: Die Volksblad reports that Juan Duval Uys is really Lodewikus Uys later called Ludi Uys and that he might be connected with a murder committed in Kroonstad in 1993. Lodewikus just does not have the same right to it as all the aliases Mr. Uys came up with.
