Suffering and sacrifices made during apartheid were not in vain, Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa said at a Human Rights Day rally in Sharpeville, Vereeniging, on Tuesday.
March 21 is a South African public holiday to commemorate the massacre in 1960 when 67 people were killed and 180 injured during a protest at Sharpeville.
Said Shilowa on Tuesday: ”To borrow from the words of freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu, their blood had indeed nourished the tree that would bear the fruits of freedom.”
He said that while South Africa is charged with remembering those who lost their lives in struggling for freedom, the impact of apartheid, discrimination and injustice against which they fought should also be remembered.
”An important pillar of apartheid’s vision of racist domination and control was the system of influx control. This system sought to make African people foreigners in the country of their birth and banish them to the poverty-stricken Bantustans, which were apartheid’s reservoirs of cheap labour.”
Shilowa said South Africa’s new Constitution is proof that those hurdles have been overcome.
”It [the Constitution] represented the beginning of a new phase in the struggle to make a living reality of the political and socio-economic rights which our people had lived and died for.
”This year we are also celebrating the 10th anniversary of the adoption of our democratic Constitution on May 8 1996.”
South Africa’s current democracy is hailed as a shining testimony to the strides made in terms of constitutional rights and the values of human dignity, equality and freedom that it upholds.
Shilowa ended in thanking the public for their participation in the March local government elections, saying many analysts were proven wrong when they projected low voting turnouts.
”I want to thank all of you who participated in the election, proving wrong many of the analysts who said you would stay away from the polls.”
He challenged the voting public to work with those they placed into leadership to build better communities.
Shilowa also said that over the next three years, R3-billion will be spent on urban renewal in Gauteng’s townships.
”This will go a long way in continuing to break the apartheid legacy of underdevelopment in our townships and building sustainable and vibrant communities with decent social amenities and access to economic opportunities,” he said while referring to the urban renewal programmes implemented in Alexandra, Evaton, Bekkersdal and Kliptown in Gauteng.
‘Watershed’
The 1960 Sharpeville massacre was a ”watershed moment” that helped bring democracy to South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki said in Rome on Tuesday.
”From their peculiar vantage point, the apartheid government thought that their brutality at Sharpeville would crush the people’s spirit of resistance,” Mbeki said in an address to Italian President Carlo Ciampi, according to a copy of his speech.
He said the killing of 69 people at Sharpeville on March 21 during a protest against the pass laws ”pricked” the conscience of the world. Consequently, said Mbeki, the day marks the 10th anniversary of the adoption of a new Constitution in South Africa.
Mbeki is on a visit to Italy to promote economic ties between the two countries. His visit marks the last state visit to that country during Ciampi’s current term in office.
South Africans ‘optimistic’
South Africans are the eighth-most-optimistic people in the world and more than 80% believe in a happy future for all in the country, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a seminar in The Hague, The Netherlands, to mark national Human Rights Day, Van Schalkwyk said South Africa is also experiencing the single longest period of sustained economic growth since World War II.
”Perhaps the single greatest achievement of our new democracy, however, has been the growing national consensus … of pride in our shared South African identity,” he said.
The minister said the differences between the South Africa of 46 years ago, when the Sharpeville massacre happened, and the country of March 2006 cannot be more pronounced.
”In place of global headlines about repression and violence, South Africans today are making news as world leaders — from the Oscars to the cricket ovals, from boardrooms to cyberspace and even outer space.”
Claiming human rights
Ten years after the Constitution was accepted in 1996, South Africa needs a civil society that claims its human rights in a more assertive and activist manner, Pieter Mulder, leader of the Freedom Front Plus, said in a statement on Tuesday.
”Because a commission, as determined in Section 185 of the Constitution, does not claim any rights on behalf of cultural and other communities, cultural and other communities in South Africa will have to create more instruments through which these rights can be claimed,” he said.
South Africans should remember human rights as contained in the Constitution are there to protect individuals and minorities against the power of the state. These rights relate to the use of language, property appropriation and cultural minorities.
”Section Seven of the Constitution stipulates that the state has to promote all the rights contained in the Constitution. Because any state authority only reacts to pressure and opposition, South Africans are running the risk that without a more assertive civil society which claims these rights, these rights will gradually be ignored or scaled down by the state,” said Mulder.
The state institutions of Chapter Nine of the Constitution were created to act as independent watchdogs over these rights.
”The FF+ is extremely disappointed in the total inability of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Language Communities (Section 185) to show any results as a watchdog.
”To date, this commission has only been busy to appoint personnel and hold conferences while there is pressure from all sides on cultural, religious and language communities.
”The Afrikaans-language community has had to fight to date, without any help from this commission, battles about Afrikaans schools and universities. Where Afrikaners are not colonialists who can return to Europe, it is important that their cultural and history heritage in South Africa is also protected and retained.
”Historical place names, which have great emotional meaning for this community, are part of this. This commission apparently does not see it as its task to become involved in issues such as theses,” Mulder said. — Sapa