People from all walks of life turned up at the Paarl town hall to make their mark on the new constitution — supporting Cyril Ramaphosa’s desire for it to be a ‘nation-building’ process. Gaye Davis joined in the fun
THE middle-aged man in the floppy hat on the balcony wasn’t sure why we needed a new constitution. Other countries had changes in government without rewriting the supreme law of the land, so why should we? When the Nats come back in five years’ time, they’ll also want a rewrite. But he was there anyway, ”to hear”.
The 600 people ranged beneath him in Paarl’s town hall were there to do more than listen. Fanning themselves with white and blue pamphlets (”The new constitution will be written by the most important person in the country — you”), they listened and laughed as an ebullient Western Cape MEC for Safety and Security, Patrick McKenzie, introduced the speakers.
Constitutional Assembly chairman Cyril Ramaphosa liked ”reading biographies, watching motor racing, going trout fishing and, most of all, comrades, he enjoys jazz”. When deputy chairman Leon Wessels (”he likes golf and cycling and has run the Comrades Marathon twice”) greeted Ramaphosa with a ”Heyta, Bra Cyril”, the crowd cracked up.
It was the launch of the Constitutional Assembly’s public participation campaign — the first of a series of briefings planned for each province and the first leg of a huge outreach campaign designed to include ordinary South Africans in what Ramaphosa billed as ”an opportunity that comes once in the lifetime of a nation”.
Switching from English to Afrikaans while a Xhosa translator followed him, Ramaphosa was both urgent — ”It has to be written in two years, which means that all of us must put our shoulders to the wheel” — and reassuring: ”Your input will be taken into account by the theme committees … it will not be a Mickey Mouse process.
”Your views are very important. This constitution must not be a party political constitution but one of all South Africans — an instrument of reconciliation and nation-building.”
Hands reaching skyward were initially tentative, but soon became a forest. There was the man in the polyester shirt, riled by toyi-toyiing policemen and nurses.
A Rastafarian with waist-length dreadlocks wanted to know whether there’d be any provision for his religion and the legalisation of ganja. A Xhosa-speaking woman was ada-mant the death sentence should remain. A Xhosa- speaking man wanted ”the power of the ladies” to be ”limited or they will no longer behave as ladies”, earning a woman’s sharp riposte: ”He doesn’t realise our madam speaker is a woman — my brother, you’d better draw up!”
There was the ANC activist, pro-choice himself, who believed ”the community at large” should be able to make an input on the question of abortion.
How much and yet how little had changed for most of those present came singing through: ”I am starving now,” said one man. ”My worry is that at the end of the day we as black people are still discriminated against even though we brought the government into being,” said another. ”We’re told this is a democracy but we’re still feeling the pinches of autocracy,” said another.
These comments were woven into questions around poverty, the plight of farmworkers whose employers ”owned” them, the lack of housing and jobs. People were occupying chairs in what was once white Paarl’s seat of power, but the echoes of the old South Africa still reverberated.
”We should make it an offence for anyone in the rightwing to refer to us as hotnots and kaffirs,” said one man. Dictionaries should be purged of the words outa, jong, meid, he added.
Question time ran into overtime and still the hands sprouted: the name of the country should be changed, President Nelson Mandela should have the right to resort to nationalisation ”because the RDP and affirmative action might fail”.
As Edward Shalala, the Constitutional Assembly’s director of community liaison pointed out in a later interview, the educational programme is ”designed to develop a process leading to constitutional allegiance, the context of a rights culture and the importance of constitutionalism”.
A key concern is to ”protect the non-party political nature of the process”. Another issue to be decided is whether public events around the constitution can run alongside local government election campaigns. Said Shalala: ”It’s a matter of debate … Some say we could, others say not.”
The Paarl briefing was designed to introduce the community outreach process in the province, with Constitutional Assembly staffers liaising with the premier’s offices and local authorities.
>From February 25, more structured meetings involving theme committee members will be held, preceded by workshops with communities and organisations run by Constitutional Assembly staffers (not politicians), ”so that people will have some chance to come to the meetings with clarity”. These will run until June 30.
Parties gave the green light to launch the process at a Constitutional Assembly management committee meeting last Friday. They also have the final say over where the campaign is taken. Shalala said while all parties had concerns about the programme, most were technical.
”Obviously we’re going to be learning lessons from this — it’s never been done before,” Shalala said. The same might apply to the majority of South Africans.