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
Critics have wrongly slammed as “conspicuous consumption” the Guptas’ modest demand for helicopter landing rights in the leafy Johannesburg suburb of Saxonwold. They do not realise that the family has for some weeks secretly printed a newspaper called The New Age. An air-drop distribution system may be essential if this cult publication is to be brought to members of the wider reading public for the first time. – Anthony Butler in a scathingly funny piece on the Gupta family
