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
It is my contention that the ANC’s leadership crisis is greater at a collective level than it is at individual level. To some extent, the failures of an individual leader can be mitigated by a strong collective. Such a collective can be useful even when an organisation is in the middle of a golden period of leadership because it can defend the membership against the imperious tendencies of a capable and popular leader. We saw an attempt to do this in 2005, when the national executive committee of the ANC called on Zuma and Mbeki to craft a joint solution to what was becoming a bruising battle between their supporters in the months following the axing by Mbeki of Zuma as deputy president of the country. Their failure to craft such a solution precipitated another element of the leadership crisis — the collapse of the leadership collective and the open political warfare that followed. It is in this context that we must understand the battle for Mangaung. – Aubrey Matshiqi in Business Day
