Constitution Day, May 8, must be a day of celebration — a red-letter day — for South Africa because what it represents took 53 years to achieve, says South African President Thabo Mbeki. This was the entrenchment of the concept of self-determination.
In his regular online column, ANC Today, the ruling African National Congress leader said the day provided an opportunity for the 10th anniversary of
the 1996 Constitution — forged by the joint assembly of the then senate and national assembly sitting as a constitutional assembly — to celebrate the giving of life to self determination.
“This is important because it has always been at the very heart of the objectives of our movement for national liberation,” said the president.
The document, which entrenches an inalienable Bill of Rights, was forged by the new multi-party democracy, which had been elected in the country’s first non-racial election in 1994. Then ANC Constitution-maker Cyril Ramaphosa and then former ruling National Party negotiator Roelf Meyer played a key role in fine-tuning the Constitution.
Mbeki is to address a joint sitting of the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces on Monday to celebrate the anniversary of the Constitution.
Special guests at the ceremony will be Ramaphosa, now a prominent businessman and then chairperson of the constitutional assembly, his deputy Leon Wessels and Meyer, who had served as Minister of Constitutional Development.
Providing a sketch of the background to the Constitution-making in the mid-1990s, Mbeki said on Friday that: “Our movement underlined its pursuit of the fundamental objective of national self-determination as early as 1943, when the annual African National Congress adopted the historic document, ‘The Africans’
Claims’. This was a response to the 1941 ‘Atlantic Charter’ elaborated by United States President Franklin D Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which later evolved into the United Nations Charter.
“What our movement described in 1943 as ‘most urgent in the [then] Union [later Republic] of South Africa’ took 51 years to achieve, and 53 years to entrench in the final document elaborated and adopted by the elected representatives of our people as our basic law, the Constitution adopted in 1996,” noted Mbeki.
He said that the movement said at the time that the principle of self-determination “necessarily raised not only issues relating to the independent
existence of small nations beside their powerful neighbours but those also concerning the political rights and status of minorities and of Africans”. – I-Net Bridge