A Freedom Front Plus (FF+) motion to have all Cabinet members confined to Robben Island for a period of 10 years before they take up their appointments was defeated in Parliament this week.
Griep du Pisanie of the FF+ had tabled the motion with what he termed the best of intentions. ‘We have all seen what many years of harsh incarceration did in producing leaders of the calibre of Nelson Mandela,” Du Pisanie told Not the Mail & Guardian. It gave him and many others as much as 27 years in which to reflect on how power can so easily be abused — as had been the case in Mandela’s own and the trials of other then-treasonous activists against apartheid. It also helped the prisoners to become sources within themselves of great courage and constraint.
The motion was vigorously condemned in debate by the Democratic Alliance Minus (DA-), which said that the FF+ was trying to make cheap political capital out of claiming that anyone who is confined and made to dig in a quarry on a barren windswept island will automatically become a better person.
The member for the Christian Democrats Divided (CD/) interpolated, saying that Dr Allan Boesak had been vastly improved as a person and leader after being imprisoned for stealing funds, food, shelter, clothing and medicines meant for starving children. The Reverend Boesak showed us to do all that in the name of God, said the CD/ member.
No comment was available from the African National Congress Multiplied (ANCx). —