Amy Biehl Memorial Lecture by Minister in The Presidency: National Planning Commission, Trevor A Manuel, at University of the Western Cape, Cape Town

Ours is a state founded on the ideals of human rights and the question that surely has to confront us repeatedly is how we live out these ideals. It is important that we are reminded that they are entrenched in our Constitution, whose Preamble states:

We, the people of South Africa, Recognise the injustices of our past;
Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;
Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country, and;
Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.

Premised on this foundation, we adopted a Constitution that would:

Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;
Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place a sovereign state in the family of nations.

These words weigh heavily and extract a deep commitment from each of us. The Constitution is that permanent bridge from the known past that was imposed, to a future whose outline was the choice of the majority of South Africans. Yet, we must remain mindful that the end- state of that future is not pre-ordained, it must be worked at diligently. The greatness of our Constitution is that its idealism is a consequence of the type of sacrifice that so many people, a great many of them young, made to deliver democracy.

We have gathered here to mark 20 years since the passing of Amy Biehl, one who lost her life in the whirlwind that ripped across our country in the last days of “formal” apartheid. The significance of her contribution was amplified by the conduct of her parents, Linda and Peter, who at that stage demonstrated the true spirit of building a united society that is now manifested in the values entrenched in our Constitution.

Although our Constitution is only 17 years old, we run the risk of forgetting its essence and the requirement that we live out its responsibilities, consciously and interactively.

In delivering the fourth Nelson Mandela Lecture in 2006, then- President Thabo Mbeki said, “I believe I know this as a matter of fact, that the great masses of our country everyday pray that the new South Africa that is being born will be a good, moral, a humane and a caring South Africa, which, as it matures, will progressively guarantee the happiness of all its citizens.”

Without wishing to detract from the strength of that sentiment, the question is how we will advance the effort towards that “good, moral, (a) humane and (a) caring South Africa.” It appears easy to identify what the gaps are, but how will such a society be created? And, how will it be reimagined and lived out?

It cannot be denied that the state has a role to play and there is often much debate in homes and in the media every single day about the failings of the state. And yes, we can measure what the state does – it provides, or should provide housing, water, energy, a good quality education, a much improved system of public health care and social services. There are few people who can actually deny the extent of

progress over the past twenty years. These responsibilities are spelt out in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution – in fact, it even spells out how these rights should be enforced, or limited and how the Bill of Rights should be interpreted. So, we can and should hold the state responsible for those rights articulated in the Constitution. But if that is all that we need for a culture of rights, then life will surely be about only that which can be measured.

There is a much bigger part that we need to focus our attention on – it begins with asking why so few of us remember and respect the values of this still-young Constitution. It asks of us why we are not more vigorously respectful of the laws that we have passed, laws designed to affirm rights and create mutual responsibilities. When and why have we stopped caring for ourselves, for each other and for our environment?

The author, Jose Saramago, who received the 1998 Nobel Literature Prize writes, “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” Other writers refer to that “something that has no name”, as the “soul”. Nelson Mandela spoke of the need for South Africa to have an “RDP of the Soul.”

So, I contend that what is missing is that we have not committed to collectively building and uniting that sense of national being, of caring about the elevation of the intangible – our collective soul. So, yes, we have a Constitution, and we have the heroes and heroines that helped create our democracy, but we have not paused to reflect on what will fuel the process towards that “healing of the divisions of the past”, or to “establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.”

Perhaps we are too blasé about our Constitution; we appreciate the meaning and the intent but do not devote nearly enough time to considering the implementation of it in its entirety. It is both the dream of our forebears and a promise to successive generations. How do we bring this to life?

The poet Langston Hughes wrote the masterful poem “A Dream
Deferred”. It reads:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore – And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over – Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
This is surely the burden of our time – the risk of the perishing, festering
or explosion of our dream.

When we drafted the National Development Plan that was unveiled on 15 August 2012, we invited two of South Africa’s celebrated authors, Njabulo Ndebele and Antjie Krog, to do what the Commission was battling with. Many of us work with data, we look for evidence and we make recommendations on the basis of what we know.

The gift of our artists is in imagining. Our brief to them was simple – stand in 2030 and look back to the halcyon days of 1994 and give us a bearing on the future. We told them that we would fill out the rest. So they wrote the Vision Statement which starts in this way:

We, the people of South Africa, have journeyed far since the long lines of our first democratic election on 27 April 1994, when we elected a government for us all. We began to tell a new story then. We have lived and renewed the story along the way.

Now in 2030 we live in a country which we have remade. We have created a home where everybody feels free yet bounded to others; where everyone embraces their full potential. We are proud to be a community that cares.

We have received a mixed legacy of Inequalities in opportunity and in where we Have lived, but we have agreed to change our Narrative of conquest, oppression, resistance, We felt a way towards a new sense of ourselves

That new narrative that changes the relations of conquest, oppression and resistance through the reimagining of our capability is what we ought to construct. But, and this is very important, it cannot be the responsibility of the state. Or more precisely, of the state alone.

The Constitution was, of course, drafted through a process of negotiation. The process was essentially between a majority who had been excluded for centuries and a minority that sought to hang onto power by all means. Read the Constitution again, and know that the values contained are unlikely to have been contributed by the oppressive minority. They happened to have had the power of state.

The contribution to successive generations, as contained in our Constitution came from the forces that were prepared to sacrifice for democracy. Those forces were united and aligned, essentially, against the state. The mobilisation of support and the articulation of those values, largely expressed in the Freedom Charter, were targeted against the state at the time.

It seemed that, when democracy was entrenched with the adoption of the Constitution, some 25 months after the first elections, there appeared to be the complete demobilisation of civil society. It was not announced, nor was it a cataclysmic act – one day it was just no longer there in the form that we understood. The important question that we need to resolve is whether the adoption of the Constitution was the highwater-mark of our nation’s history, or one of the important milestones in the progress towards its fulfilment.

There was the approach that whatever needed to be fixed, even the creation of a sense of national soul, was deemed to be the responsibility of the state. This is the critical error that we must understand in order to correct. I want to repeat that the state cannot be absolved of its responsibilities, but states, almost without exception. do not actually understand the stuff of the soul. I speak from the premise of one who has been in government for almost twenty years.

The academic Erich Fromm, whose lifetime of research and publishing spans almost five decades, and whose work include titles such as “Fear of Freedom” and “Dialectic of Enlightenment” wrote in “To Have or To Be”, what he described as the conditions for human change. He wrote, “I suggest that human character can change if these conditions exist:

  • We are suffering and are aware that we are,
  • We recognise the origin of our ill-being,
  • We recognise that there is a way of overcoming our ill-being,
  • We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life.”

It is surely these elements that we have to focus on. The National Development Plan recognises the deficiencies in the manner in which responsibilities have been ‘outsourced’ to the state. It makes recommendations on some of the ways to reclaim and redistribute responsibility.

It says, “Active citizenry and social activism is necessary for democracy and development to flourish. The state cannot merely act on behalf of the people – it has to act with the people, working together with other institutions to provide opportunities for the advancement of all communities”. The NDP also counteracts the notion that societal leadership is vested exclusively in the Head of State.

It says, “South Africa needs leaders throughout society to work together. Just as the transition from apartheid was a win-win solution rather than a short- sighted power struggle, the fight against poverty and inequality will have benefits for all black and white, rich and poor. Given the country’s

divided past, leaders sometimes advocate positions that serve narrow, short-term interests at the expense of a broader, long-term agenda. It is necessary to break out of this cycle, with leaders that are willing and able to take on greater responsibility to address South Africa’s challenges.”

It is now accepted in much of the literature on leadership that we should learn to distinguish between ‘the authority of office’, which is frequently electoral, and ‘leadership’ that tends to be behavioural. These are not subversive, counter-revolutionary views. Rather, they are the views articulated in our NDP, which has been adopted by virtually every political party and warmly embraced by a myriad of civil society organisations.

What we must do is to facilitate ownership and agency of solutions. Our dream will remain deferred, perhaps even forever, unless we take responsibility for its implementation. The Constitution provides the intent and the foundation of nationhood, but the task of nation- building rests on each of our shoulders. It is a process that will fail if we do not generate cadres of leaders who take ownership and responsibility. The promise of our Constitution is to build a single nation, “united in our diversity”, and caring in its conduct.

Progress in society is never linear and the lack of attention to the detail of implementation is likely to result in neglect - Development will stall. There is even the risk that we may forget to look back on the path this young nation has traversed, and believe that we do not need the vision provided by the values that we should hold dear.

We can only do this if we consciously create agency outside of the state. This is not about oppositional politics. For democracy to flourish, there has to be a strong, active and voiced non-government sector, frequently interacting with a responsive government. We have achieved so much in the context of a hostile and exclusive state previously, how much more should be expected when we have a government of the people. This breakdown in relations is, sadly, a telling indictment of our appreciation of shared responsibilities in democracy.

Part of looking at agency is to recall, reclaim and reinvigorate the values that we hold dear. When last has anybody heard a leader in South Africa remind us of the value of Ubuntu for our collective well-being? Should we not reclaim it, starting right here? Should I not, myself, be held to account for that oversight?

Or how do we express ourselves against this notion of crude accumulation of wealth at all costs? Perhaps, what we observe around us confirms that indeed, ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’. It has destroyed individuals who had previously built strong reputations, it is destroying organisations and ravaging communities. It must be halted, and only the people and organisations that care and are prepared to demonstrate their commitment can reclaim that space.

And when do we start to demonstrate solidarity? We are gathered here to celebrate the life and contribution of Amy and of her parents Linda and Peter, but also of the example of Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni.

There is so much that is great in this example about forgiveness and compassion. In these past few weeks I have also been thinking deeply about other mothers – one of them, whose story appears often in my thoughts, is Mrs Ellen Pakkies who killed her tik-addicted son, Abie. In so many ways there are mothers like her who face an uphill battle with their children against this new enemy in our midst – and I ask, where is our solidarity expressed to these families?

More importantly, in the same way as we built the organisations in our communities that were our places of learning - places where we learnt about life, about culture, about resistance and about how to strengthen our character, how to take responsibility and how to build structures - we must support the growth of civic organisations, especially by young people, in every community. This activism is demanded by the life and times of the present.

We must know that we can recapture this lost spirit. South Africa must rise again, together, as a united nation committed not to the wealthiest and strongest among us, but to those who need solidarity the most. This is the value of that which is entrenched in our Constitution. This is our calling to “Improve the quality of life of all citizens and to free the potential of each person.”

I would like to end with the words of Tony Judt, from “Ill fares the Land”, where he writes, “Even if every conservative and reactionary regime around the globe were to implode tomorrow, its public image hopelessly tarnished by corruption and incompetence, the politics of conservatism would survive intact. The case for ‘conserving’ would remain as viable as it has ever been. But for the Left, the absence of a historically-buttressed narrative leaves an empty space. All that remains is politics: the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social-accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.”

Our purpose in gathering here is not merely to remember Amy and our past, but it is – perhaps even more importantly – to prevent the catastrophe that Judt speaks of, “the mere administration of men and things”, that masquerades as politics.

Our dream, our idealism, is so well articulated in our Constitution, and as we take leave of each other this evening, the question confronting each of us should be, “what am I prepared to commit to make this country a better place for all of us?”

I thank you!

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