Ten years ago today things were touch and go for the country and for the election that would deliver the new South Africa. In-fighting dogged the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) and the final round of brinkmanship on the part of those involved in the talks to end apartheid cast doubt on whether the poll would go ahead at all. A disenfranchised nation knew little about voting, and about running elections — and it showed.
The ballot papers, when they finally appeared on April 27 1994, were a messy affair. The Inkatha Freedom Party’s late entry into the race required that its name be added to the ballot with a sticker. Even as some began to cast their votes, ballot papers were still being airlifted to voting stations across the country.
Democracy almost did not dawn, but with a little Chinese maths and a whole lot of political will South Africa muddled through.
It’s a different world now. The IEC is so organised that the ballot papers have already been printed and delivered to all the voting districts. And while African National Congress and IFP tempers are still flaring (some things stay the same), it’s unlikely that Mangosuthu Buthelezi will lead his party out of electoral politics. An accommodation between the two parties will be found after April 14.
Like the IEC, our Constitution and many of the institutions of government have been strengthened and become better over time. But, ahead of this election, the country’s commitment to constitutionalism is threatened by the eagerness with which many opposition parties have embraced the need to “Vang hulle en hang hulle” (Catch ’em and hang ’em high). The death penalty is in our past and there it should stay.
If the abolition of the death penalty comes under attack today, then it could be gay rights next, socio-economic rights, abortion.
Most parties are promising a sunset clause to employment equity, not pointing out to their supporters that the formal policy is not even three years old yet. Workers’ rights have also been sacrificed too easily on the altar of political expediency. Most parties, bar the ANC, Pan Africanist Congress and the Independent Democrats, believe flexible labour policies are key ingredients of job delivery. But jobs of what quality, they must ask? The working poor, a term used to describe those who toil but remain in poverty, take us back to Dickensian times, not to a more equitable 21st century.
Sometimes the system works
No doubt the news that Anita Ferreira’s life sentence has been suspended and she is to be released next week will set tongues wagging that “this women’s lib thing has gone too far”.
Ferreira was tried and jailed for her part in a conspiracy to murder her husband after he had subjected her to years of physical and mental abuse.
The judgement sends out a powerful message to our society. The message is not that women may murder their spouses with impunity. But it makes it clear that women who murder men who have subjected them to serious abuse will have their crimes seen in their proper context and that this context may be used in mitigation of sentence.
South Africa has some of the most progressive legislation in the world to deal with gender violence, yet often the complaint is that legal rights exist only on paper and are not implemented in reality. And for the hundreds of thousands of girls and women in this country who face rape, violence and aggression on a daily basis this may be true.
Yet events over the past week other than the Ferreira judgement suggest that years of hard work by organisations fighting gender violence are starting to pay off and that the courts are making decisions that turn formal rights into substantive ones.
A recent judgement in the Cape High Court in favour of Sonja Grobler against her former employer, Naspers, found that employers are liable for sexual harassment committed by their employees if they fail to protect victims from dirty office gropers. She won over a million rand in damages plus costs — an unprecedented award.
Kaizer Chiefs official Putco Mafani was arrested on a charge of assault this week after his wife was hospitalised with head injuries.  The club’s decision to keep him in his job while the charges run their course has raised eyebrows, but national censure has rained down on the soccer personality.
Both the director of the National Prosecuting Authority, Bulelani Ncquka, and the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Penuell Maduna, quickly weighed in to condemn gender violence, promising that the full wrath of the law would come down on the perpetrator’s head. There are new men in our midst and that is vital.
The events of the past fortnight indicate that women have growing confidence in acting to protect their rights and are a confirmation that the Bill of Rights is not designed to protect perpetrators only, but also those whose rights have been violated.