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.

Justice Albie Sachs
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
31 August 2009

The National Committee expressed concerns over the utterances attributed to Julius Malema towards the leadership of the Alliance. Many men far greater and better than Julius have travelled the road that he seeks to embark, and many more of them were doomed to failure. We doubt if the majority of members of the ANC Youth League shares his sentiment of insulting Comrade Blade Nzimande, as we know that many of them holds him in high regard. We also do not believe that insults should come first in the place of intellectual discourse, and that hurling insults is merely a form of expressing intellectual bankruptcy. In the ANC and the National Liberation Movement, we have always referred to “narrow African Chauvinism” as a characterization of a tendency, not a label; this is known in the movement. We believe that Julius has crossed the line, and call on our sister organisation, the ANC Youth League, to distance itself from his insults. We want to also place on record that getting into discussions about what brand of whisky people drink, or what their social conduct is when they have drank it will not help the debate and can only hide the real issues behind racial transformation. – Young Communist League on Julius Malema

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