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
3 November 2010

For a former president in the Nelson Mandela epoch, who repeated parrot-like “a nonracist society”, and who knows how negative comments about “foreigners” can stoke massacres and civil wars (even in his beloved Nigeria), Mbeki’s spit about native whites as “foreigners”, implying they are suitable targets for xenophobic attacks, was racist provocation animated by a malicious spirit acting through a lost soul. Mbeki’s denial of reality — of the very deep roots of white people in SA, whose contributions made him an African president with virtually a private jet to gad about — is, however, mild compared with his fatal denial of a disease that is ravaging his race. His institute would be a conduit for Mbeki denialism, a tragic prospect for other generations and regions. – Meshack Mabogoane in Business Day

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