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
Even where Malema is apparently pursuing radical change, in the mining industry, he is in fact helping to entrench the spoils system at the heart of Mbeki’s ANC. He recently complained that “those who go around spreading lies and rumours linking the ANC Youth League to big business people should stop doing so because it is not funny anymore”. However, as this column has previously observed, Malema is fronting a putsch by Mbeki-era apparatchiks to create a state-owned mining company. Malema’s presentation to Parliament’s mining portfolio committee last week contained some comic gems. Those who do not yet know how the spoils will be distributed should take note of Malema’s insistence that the state-owned mining company should be “under the direct supervision of the Department of Mineral Resources” and “not public enterprises”. – Anthony Butler in Business Day
