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
Lame duck Mbeki?
The local Sasco branch at the University of Western Cape is contesting the SRC election to be held later this week. They usually win the elections because they run on an ANC ticket. In previous years their election posters usually contained pictures of a smiling President Thabo Mbeki, the same picture used by the ANC during the national election campaign in 2004. I see this year Sasco posters have a large picture of Nelson Mandela. No sign of President Mbeki. The students at Sasco obviously decided they will get more votes with Mandela than with Mbeki. Or did they choose a picture of the ANC leader they really like and not the one they have to pretend to like if they were going to share in the patronage of the ANC deployment committee?
