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 naked president, oddly enough, was rewarded with glowing press coverage. In part, this was the product of corny theatrics: youth league president Julius Malema was supposedly disciplined by the father of the nation and then comforted by its mother. The leader’s purported “success” was also built on ill- informed speculation before the council that a challenge to Zuma’s authority might occur at a congress located in KwaZulu-Natal. More pertinently, the council provided an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of Zuma’s campaign to intimidate the press. The positive reporting of his self-serving speeches — and the praise heaped upon him for properly rehearsing a speech before trying to deliver it — indicate that this campaign may be having its intended effect. – ANthony Butler in Business Day
