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
The doors of Parliament not open to all
We made arrangements to collect our tickets to the public gallery a day before the event, but when we arrived at the side gate of Parliament it was firmly locked. The polite but firm policeman informed me that all gates to Parliament had been locked on instructions form his superiors and that no one would be allowed in or ou
t of the Parliamentary precinct for the next several hours.
This meant that I was barred from listening to my President in my Parliament answering his opposition critics. This seems to be in direct contravention of section 59 of the Constitution, which states that Parliament has a constitutional duty to conduct its business in an open manner and to allow the public access to its activities.
Yet, some power drunk fool decided that the workers, demonstrating peacefully more than a hundred meters away, posed such a mortal threat to all MPs and our President, that the gates of Parliament literally had to be locked against its own people.
Who made this heavy-handed decision? Did this person realise that he or she was sending a signal that Parliament and the President was so far removed from or even scared of the workers that it would lock the very doors of the institution against their own people?
The locking of the gates of Parliament on the very day that the President was speaking in the National Assembly, reminds me rather of the days of the apartheid regime when the President and Parliamentarians had good reason to fear the citizens of the country they were supposed to be governing.
It would be nice to think that the person who made this decision would get into serious trouble. Maybe the President – or more correctly, the Speaker – could have a word with someone so that the next time us ordinary people want to hear him speak, we will actually be allowed into the legislature.
