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
Poplak on securitisation
Then there’s the renewed promise to properly “secure state infrastructure”, to deal ever more harshly with those who throw poo at it, and to establish a piece of security apparatus – the Government Security Agency – in order to make sure we fill our prisons with demonstrators and Fallists. Does South Africa need another set of government-issue car guards working for another obscure agency with a bottomless budget for wraparound sunglasses? Probably not.
