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
Exactly 50 years ago Frantz Fanon wrote that the curse of post-colonial Africa were the leaders who took over from the colonialists only to become black colonialists themselves. He warned that such people take power from the whites to serve themselves, not the people, while using the rhetoric of a better life for all. He called such leaders the comprador. You have become a comprador even before you take formal power as an official politician. The comprador, according to Fanon, is engaged in “conspicuous consumption”. Please check the meaning of this concept in the dictionary, sir. – Andile Mngxitama, in an open letter to Julius Malema published in The Sowetan
