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
If moral outrage had a face, it would be that of Pierre de Vos. For many years now he has grown fat gnawing and chewing on the corpse of political correctness. Often, his outrage compromises his judgement, certainly his logic, as it has again done in this case. Relying on those poorly reported stories which suggested the DA’s decision was based on an isolated incident, he builds his entire case around the single Majavu story the DA took to the Press Ombudsman. Based on that story, he argues, the DA should have investigated the public representative implicated in it, rather than complain about the journalist. Its failure to do so reveals the party as hypocritical, he says. But does he apply that same logic to the DA’s complaint? Of course not. – Gareth van Onselen, the “DA’s executive director of special projects”, defending the action taken by the DA against Sowetan journalist Anna Majavu
