South Africans have much to celebrate on the country’s 13th Freedom Day, but they face the same number of real threats to hard-won liberty, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said.
”It is a sad irony that after 13 years there are 13 very real threats to our hard-won liberty, and we need to have a frank and honest discussion about them.”
First on Leon’s list is the state’s continuing attempts to encroach upon the independence of the judiciary.
Next is an overreach of the executive power, with Leon saying that a steady consolidation of authority in the Presidency has usurped decision-making from elected representatives.
The third and fourth dangers are the closing of spaces for civil society and encroachment on press and media freedom.
Next is a lack of respect for democratic outcomes, with the African National Congress’s (ANC) attempts to unseat the DA-led Cape Town multiparty coalition as a warning that government cares about democracy as long as it is winning.
Number six is crime, with most South Africans living in fear.
Next is foreign policy, which Leon said has betrayed a legacy of negotiated democratic settlement by supporting or refusing to condemn a ”rogues’ gallery of despotic regimes”.
”We are becoming associated with the polecat-club of dictators shunned by most of the world.”
Eighth is the ANC’s determination to rewrite history to privilege its role above others — changing place names, airbrushing individual histories and ”generally falsifying history into one, triumphalist, majority-nationalist narrative”.
HIV/Aids follows, and at number ten is worsening poverty and joblessness with failure to implement growth-driven reforms ”lighting a powder-keg of resentment amongst the poor”.
”Far too many of our people stand resentfully outside the winners’ enclosure, peering at a small, well-connected elite whose privilege drives home the majority’s suffering.”
Education and skills training is the eleventh listed danger, followed by failure to deliver on promises.
The thirteenth threat subsumes the others, Leon said.
”It is the governing party’s obsession with transformation, meaning political control by the ANC of all levers of power in society as well as the relentless pursuit of demographic representivity at all costs.”
This is ”inimical” to the values of individual freedom and accountability, Leon said. — Sapa