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
Anton Fagan is a law professor at the University of Cape Town. We remember him in academic dress marching with TAC for the dismissal of then-Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. But speaking generally he has never understood the Constitution, the society in which lives or his privilege. He eschews context and people in his scholarship. Schooled in the formalism and steeped in the pedantry of a law professor, he came to the defence of DA leader and Western Cape Premier when she viciously and personally attacked Janet Love of the Legal Resources Centre as a “dumped cadre”. Love failed to meet Zille’s standards of independence or integrity as a Human Rights Commissioner after that body found her party’s City of Cape Town administration to have violated the Constitution. – Zackie Achmat on the Writing Rights Blog
