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
But let me acknowledge once more, loud and clear: I am an apartheid beneficiary. I am not proud of it. I am ashamed of the fact that gross human-rights violations were perpetrated in the name of my volk, that some of my fellow Afrikaners have shown absolutely no remorse, no humility with respect to the privileges they have enjoyed and still enjoy in post-apartheid South Africa. In Germany it is a crime to deny the Holocaust. Why should it be any different in South Africa for apartheid beneficiaries when they deny that they aided and abetted in the perpetration of and benefitted from a crime against humanity that remains as this untranslatable word, apartheid? – Jaco Barnard-Naude in a Blog post on Thought Leader
