Have the laws of our democracy and their application helped or hindered us in realising the kind of society envisaged in our Constitution? What are the gaps? Are there too many laws? Are many of them too complicated? Tell us your experiences, writes Kgalema Motlanthe
On Thursday and Friday, the High Level Panel on Assessment of Key Legislation and Acceleration of Fundamental Change will be holding its fifth provincial public hearing at the Johannesburg City Hall - just less than 10km from Sophiatown, that vibrant mixed race suburb condemned to forced removal in the 1950s.
Writing in his seminal work Naught For Your Comfort, published in March 1956, cleric and anti-apartheid activist Father Trevor Huddleston poignantly reflected: “Sophiatown! How hard it is to capture and to convey the magic of that name!
“Once it is a matter of putting pen to paper all the life and colour seems to leave it: and failing to explain its mysterious fascination is somehow a betrayal of one’s love for the place. It is particularly important for me to try to paint the picture that I know and that is yet so elusive, for in a few years Sophiatown will cease to exist… And, in a few years, men will have forgotten that this was a living community and a very unusual one. It will have slipped away into history, and that a fragmentary history of a fraction of time.”
Sophiatown, indeed, was razed almost entirely then rebuilt for white occupation and renamed Triomf. But it was not allowed to slip away into history, as Father Huddleston feared.
As per his wish, after Father Huddleston’s death in 1998, his ashes were interred at Christ the King Church where he had been active all those years.
In 1999, the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre opened its doors in one of the few houses that escaped the bulldozers - that of Dr AB Xuma, the president-general of the African National Congress from 1940 to 1949. And in 2006, Sophiatown got its name back.
Together with District Six in Cape Town, Sophiatown starkly symbolised the brutality of the systematic forced removal of entire communities off prime land to peripheral areas.
But there were many, many other communities all across the country which the jackboot of forced removal tore asunder.
About 3.5 million people were forcibly removed during the heyday of apartheid and land featured strongly in the panel’s public hearings in the Northern Cape in September and the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal in October.
Land to make a living, land and traditional leaders, land for housing and secure tenure, restitution for land dispossessed through the 1913 and subsequent apartheid land laws.
These were some of the key issues people raised in the different provinces.
On the Thursday and Friday set aside this week for the panel’s Gauteng listening exercise, we would like to hear - without frills - what people’s lived experiences have been of the laws of our democracy.
Perhaps land will feature here as well.
Hundreds of people have come to participate in the hearings and some travelled great distances to do so. Their accounts, from the heart, as individuals or civil society organisation representatives, have inspired the panel and kept it keenly aware of the great honour and responsibility placed on it. Not only is the panel’s mandate daunting, but so is doing justice to this mandate.
The Speakers’ Forum, a structure of Parliament and the Provincial Legislatures, appointed the panel in January to assess the impact of the laws of our democracy.
Of the more than 1Â000 laws passed since our first democratic election in 1994, we have identified about 100 for special consideration in three main focus areas:
* Poverty, unemployment and the equitable distribution of wealth.
* Land reform, sustainable livelihoods and rural development and security of tenure.
* Social cohesion and nation-building.
Our public hearings and round tables with academics, experts and civil society organisations in particular fields are part of our efforts to publicise the panel’s work and to encourage ownership of the task at hand by a range of South Africans.
By the end of this year, the panel would have held public hearings in six of the nine provinces. After Gauteng comes the Western Cape on December 5 and 6.
In addition to our public hearings and round tables, we have invited the public to give us written submissions. The cut-off date for these is the end of March 2017.
* Submissions may be handed in at public hearings (handwritten if typing is out of the question), posted to PO Box 2164, Cape Town 8000 (attention Leanne Morrison) or e-mailed to [email protected]
The 17-member panel are:
* Mr Kgalema Motlanthe, former president of the RSA (panel chair);
* Tito Mboweni, former Reserve Bank governor;
* Bridgette Mabandla, former cabinet minister;
* Judge Navi Pillay, former United Nations human rights commissioner;
* Professor Haroon Bhorat, professor of economics and director of the development policy research unit, University of Cape Town;
* Dr Olive Shisana, president and CEO - Evidence Based Solutions;
* Reverend Malcolm Damon, CEO of Southern African Network on Inequality and founder member of the Economic Justice Network;
* Professor Eddy Maloka, CEO of the African Peer Review Mechanism;
* Dr Terence Nombembe, former auditor-general; Mthandeki Nhlapo, former SA Municipal Workers’ Union secretary-general;
* Professor Vivienne Taylor, social policy and development, University of Cape Town;
* Professor Alan Hirsch, department of economics, University of Cape Town;
* Paul Harris, FirstRand founder;
* Professor Yvonne Muthien, non-executive director and chairperson of companies;
* Professor Relebohile Moletsane, education and development, University of KwaZulu-Natal;
* Dr Aninka Claassens, land reform, University of Cape Town;
* Thulani Tshefuta, South African Youth Council.
** Motlanthe is Chairperson High Level Panel on Assessment of Key Legislation and Acceleration of Fundamental Change
Cape Times