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
During the Constitutional Court interviews… [Chief Justice] Mogoeng was in a pulpit-pummelling mood, spending a chunk of Kollapen’s almost two-hour interview raging against various devils, including the potential for “judicial capture” not with money but through an intellectual co-option. He stridently observed the danger of judges “outsourcing our thinking” and becoming “victims” of unnamed people, institutions and agendas (in the media and the academy… and the shadows, presumably) that apparently stroke the egos of judges to the point where they “do not want to be critical, you want to look like a superstar, when you are not”.
