Enforcing a human rights culture among South Africans remains the government’s main challenge, Deputy President Jacob Zuma said on Monday.
Launching an African National Congress human rights book at Johannesburg’s Constitutional Hill, Zuma said: ”But these challenges are not insurmountable.”
The book, titled Legacy of Freedom: The ANC’s Human Rights Tradition, was edited by former education minister Kader Asmal, David Chidester and Cassius Lubisi.
Asmal currently chairs Parliament’s defence portfolio committee.
Chidester is a professor at the University of Cape Town and Lubisi was Asmal’s adviser when he was a minister.
By selecting significant landmarks in the ANC’s history, the book’s editors sought to show how the ANC contributed to shaping South Africa’s Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Through documents, the editors show how grounded in human rights is the ANC’s ”long-established tradition of freedom”, the book’s sleeve note says.
Zuma, who left shortly after giving his speech to attend another Human Rights Day event in Cape Town, said the Freedom Charter was a precursor to South Africa’s Constitution.
He urged commentators to read the book, as it would enable them ”to know the truth … so that when they comment they should at least know this bit of history”.
”An ignorant nation can be dangerous to itself because it can be easily misled by those who are well-articulated,” Zuma said.
Monday’s book launch was also attended by Asmal, the ANC’s Kgalema Motlanthe and Smuts Ngonyama, Blade Nzimande of the South African Communist Party, the United Democratic Movement’s Bantu Holomisa and National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gwen Mahlangu.
Asmal said the Irish government donated €10 000 for the book, which sells for R50.
ANC ‘destroys’ minority rights
Meanwhile, the Freedom Front Plus on Monday accused the ANC of destroying minority rights under the guise of correcting the past.
”What is currently happening in South Africa is that minority rights of groups such as the Afrikaans speakers are infringed upon and destroyed under the guise of correcting the past,” FF+ leader Pieter Mulder said in a statement to mark Human Rights Day.
Commenting on President Thabo Mbeki’s weekly newsletter, on the ANC website, Mulder questioned whether some human rights are more important than others.
”There is conflict between the country’s constitutional articles aiming to correct the ‘ills of the past’ and those to provide cultural diversity,” he said. ”A balance between these rights is necessary. But the political will for it does not exist within the ANC.”
In his letter, Mbeki wrote: ”Contrary to what our detractors have sought to convey, the reality is that the human rights architecture contained in our Constitution, our country’s fundamental law, specifically requires that we should redress the wrongs we inherited from our colonial and apartheid past.”
Mulder said the president presented a ”one-sided argument”, by concentrating only on correcting the past and ”missed the point of the debate”.
Mulder claimed the ANC has bullied through the name change of Pretoria and criticised the fact that Cuban engineers are being hired instead of white South Africans. He also advised Mbeki not to use the business community to strengthen his arguments.
”The business community’s main aim has always been to make money regardless of who is in power,” he said. ”It has therefore always been blindly loyal to any government. The president should rather ask himself why people who have no business interest, criticise him.”
Mulder went on to highlight the plight of Mikro Primary School, in the Western Cape, which is fighting to continue tutoring in Afrikaans, with the matter to be heard by the Constitutional Court.
According to Mulder the school is constitutionally correct as it provides cultural diversity.
”This is the debate. Is it possible for a school to be Afrikaans and representative of the total population at the same time? How do you balance these? This debate touches upon the essence of the way in which the South African diversity will be accommodated or not accommodated at all in future.”
Mulder added that as long as the ANC continues to argue in the way it did in the Mbeki newsletter, its argument that South Africa has one of the best and most modern Constitutions in the world falls away. — Sapa