DM168 Analysis: SA’s birth certificate: A Constitution that still needs to be fulfilled 25 years later

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It was the new SA’s ‘birth certificate’. Have our leaders and civil servants honoured it?

Saturday, 8 May, marks 25 years since legislators adopted SA’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, for human rights and freedoms, dignity and equality in an accountable, open and responsive democratic state, as the founding values stipulate.

“What our people expect, is that we shall have a Constitution which will allow us to break from the past,” he said. In his “I am an African” speech, then deputy president Thabo Mbeki made the Constitution central to the outcome of SA’s struggles and aspirations. “The great masses … will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric. Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad.

Mandela went off script. Anyone wanting to block this “mandate from the overwhelming majority of the people of this country to transform this country from an apartheid state to a non-racial state”, he said, according to the broadcast of the day’s proceedings on C-Span, would become a voice in the wilderness. It was a nod to the tensions of the time. On 9 May 1996, De Klerk’s NP decided to leave the Government of National Unity.

The Constitution has been amended 17 times, sometimes in fundamental shifts like making the Constitutional Court the apex court, and sometimes for political reasons – like floor crossing, so the New NP could leave its June 2000 alliance with the DA. The Constitution, in Chapter 5 on the president and national executive, bars them from using their position to enrich themselves, but State Capture Commission testimony, the Gupta Leaks and, more recently, the Covid-19 personal protective equipment tender corruption, show persistent violation of those constitutional imperatives.

 

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not under african national circus rule.... too busy stealing from the tax payers

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