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
Valkenburg here we come
The Vitamins magnate, Dr Matthias Rath, shows, shall we say, a rather eccentric side in papers lodged with the Cape High Court in his case with the Treatment Action Campaign. The Mail & Guardian reports:
The apartheid regime was part of a global plot by the pharmaceutical industry, according to vitamin entrepreneur Dr Matthias Rath. He said in an affidavit filed in the Cape High Court: “This regime was the political arm to turn South Africa into a bridgehead of the pharmaceutical interests with the goal to conquer and control the entire African continent.”
He also said the operations of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) were “almost a copy” of Hitler’s brown-shirt storm troopers. … “The apartheid regime in South Africa was part of this global strategy,” he said. “The apartheid regime became its political stakeholder.” He said that after World War II, thousands of high-ranking Nazi party members used the “corporate channels” of the massive German chemical-manufacturing conglomerate IG Farben to find safe haven in South Africa, where IG Farben had established subsidiaries. Also seeking refuge in this country were thousands of IG Farben managers who had participated in war crimes.
“Much the same as previously in Europe, their goal was to establish a dictatorship serving these corporate interests while keeping the majority of the population ‘under control’,” Rath said. The chemical and pharmaceutical industry became the economic pillar of the apartheid regime, and South Africa became a stronghold for pharmaceutical companies.
Rath said the goal of the “brown shirts” had been to destabilise a democratically elected German government on behalf of corporate interests and their political stakeholders. The TAC’s goal, he said, was to attack the South African government, destabilise the political situation and establish a new political leadership that would voluntarily spend millions on “toxic” antiretroviral drugs.
One sandwich short of a picnic, seems an appropriate description for Dr Rath. What has he been smoking?
