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
Diary of life in Zimbabwe
Many hundreds are savagely beaten by [Zimbabwean] security forces. Nobody will ever know the exact number, because many of the injured are too afraid to leave their homes. At least 12 people are killed. A police officer is stoned to death by protesters in Bulawayo. Over the week more than a thousand people are arrested, many of them with broken bones, some of them children as young as 14, and thrown into jails in which neither clean water nor food is provided. The tollgate at Mbudzi is burned to a shell.
