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
Quotas and targets for redress are necessary. But, because they are so politically useful, securing as they do the compliance and loyalty of elites and the middle class to the ANC, it is easy to be blinded to the negative consequences for the poor. A clear case of a good quota that will have positive long term outcomes is UCTs admission criteria, which is succeeding in producing more black and women graduates who will service society well in the coming decades. But the negative consequences of misapplied quotas and targets are also with us. – Jack Lewis at GroundUp
