Cape Town - We must not settle for a democracy that has fallen short of expectations, Trevor Manuel said in the Imam Haron Memorial Lecture on Monday night.
The former minister of finance as well as minister in the Presidency for national planning called on South Africans to be “active citizens” and to not shirk responsibility when it came to improving quality of life for all in the country.
In his speech, delivered at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Manuel noted that it had been 45 years since the “brutal murder” of Imam Abdullah Haron during his detention at Maitland police station.
Splitting those 45 years into two portions, Manuel looked at the fervent action and achievement crammed into the years up to 1992 - and the subsequent stagnation of progress.
“Our challenge is thus to explain to the living, in homage to those who are dead and in preparation for those who are yet to be born, why it is that we were fully prepared to sacrifice all to demolish apartheid, but equally to explain why we have not been competent to build the society that our constitution defines as our common purpose. Why has the latter part of the past 45 years been so different to that initial period?”
Manuel said that by outsourcing responsibility for the country’s problems to the government, the people of South Africa had “disowned (their) common purpose”.
He said that local government was more important than ever, and yet it was falling apart, and questioned whether people had stopped caring enough to take responsibility at the level of local governance.
“Or perhaps we have lost pride in who we are. A people who have freed themselves, as we have, surely cannot demonstrate such neglect.”
Manuel laid into schools, police and health-care facilities, lambasting leaders and citizens who did not care enough to make an active difference.
“This responsibility does not vest only with elected or employed officials - in fact it is up to the unelected and ordinary citizens to construct the quality of democracy that they desire.”
Manuel said there was a huge gap to be bridged between private services for those who could afford them, and public services for others - and that public service in South Africa should strive to be even better than private.
“If we stop believing this and if we stop agitating for this we must declare all sacrifices in our past struggles to have been in vain.”
He appealed to the audience to keep struggling for better living standards and services, because democracy was not simply about the right to vote.
“It cannot be sufficient to have fought for this democracy and to not care about the outcomes any longer,” he said. “We surely would not treat any other aspect of our lives… with the same disdain. Why, then, do we not mind if our democracy falls short of the ideal we envisaged during those years of struggle?”
Cape Argus