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
What to do with statues
Likewise, in Budapest, the brokers of the Communist bloc have been moved to ‘Memento Park’, where ‘giant monuments from the Soviet dictatorship’ are displayed cheek by jowl: they’re all here, the heroic peasants and founders of the fatherland, Comrades Lenin and Stalin – the latter figured only by his boots, which were all that was left of him after the revolutionaries of 1956 pulled him down.
