South Africans should not be surprised at the anger and brutality that was sweeping the streets when they continued to refuse to acknowledge the socio-economic inequalities in the country, Dr Mamphela Ramphele said on Thursday.
Ramphele, one of the World Bank’s four managing directors, was speaking in Cape Town at a conference reflecting on the work of the former Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its continuing worldwide impact.
She said the drafters of the TRC’s terms of reference had been timid in limiting its mandate to crimes against humanity defined solely in political terms.
Excluding crimes perpetrated in socio-economic terms in South Africa had been a great mistake, because the majority of the people in the country ”continue to bleed”, she said.
Their wounds were unrecognised, and their pain was totally unacknowledged.
These people, who were materially poor, but spiritually rich, had given so much to the TRC process ”and we can’t even say thank you by providing dignified reparations”, she said.
Taking a dig at African National Congress spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, who when challenged about his burgeoning business interests said he did not struggle in order to be poor, she said leaders in Parliament and in the private sector all had their rewards.
To argue that freedom should not have come with benefits for poor people was ”really dishonest”.
South Africa was not a poor country, and should have placed priority on the issue of reparations as a way of restoring dignity to people who were ”so deeply wounded and yet were so generous”.
”Yet we find money to do a whole lot of other things, including things that have got us into trouble like the arms deal,” she said.
The least that could be done was to move out of denial and recognise there had been a mistake. It was through acknowledging a mistake that one learned from it, and could move on to do better.
Speaking at the same session of the conference, Maria Ntuli of Mamelodi, whose son Jeremiah was one of a group of ten would-be exiles kidnapped and killed by apartheid security police in 1986, called for the TRC to be brought back to life.
”Please reopen the TRC, because there are still some people outside who haven’t been in the TRC,” she told the former chairperson of the body, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
”Some of them, even now they do not know what happened to their beloved ones.”
Ntuli, who was one of a group of women whose feet were recently washed by former law and order minister Adriaan Vlok, said this knowledge would give parents ”peace in their hearts”. – Sapa