Speech by the City’s Executive Mayor, Patricia de Lille
It is a great honour to be speaking with you from Rome a year after the father
of our nation, former president Mandela, Tata Madiba, left us.
His example was one that demonstrated that a commitment to the ideals of
peace and reconciliation could forge a better world.
A free man of Cape Town, we were privileged to honour Madiba in his
lifetime and I am proud to speak with you as a South African trying to give life
to his legacy.
South Africa has been in a state of transformation from a racially oppressive
regime under apartheid to one that tries to embrace democracy and
human rights today.
But transformation, the process of change, is difficult.
Given that we like to cling to certainties, we are sometimes fiercely opposed
to change because we fear that which we do not know.
This is especially difficult for a country like South Africa that is in transition,
transition from one state of being to another, transition from the architecture
of prejudice to a constitutional state of equality and freedom.
During the negotiations, there were certain principles that the liberation
movements agreed on.
The first was that the rule of law and a constitutional state was paramount.
The second was that we would have to accept in the transition that you do
not dismantle the institutions of society in order to transform it.
Rather, you change them from within and position them for a different social
purpose.
That social purpose would be redress and reconciliation, missions for which
our institutions would require the very strongest foundations.
Our entire history as a country- as a republic, as colonies, as the lands before
the colonies- had been one of division.
For a time, it seemed that history compounded itself, the prejudices of one
generation being added to the ones before it, a cycle of entrenched
animosities.
The logic of our shared experience said that it might always be so: our
positions were too entrenched; our destinies too different.
But sometimes received wisdom needs just one contradiction to be swept
away, allowing the space for new wisdoms, new realities, to be created.
20 years ago, the framework of separation was removed and the swell of
new hope, new possibilities and unchartered futures swept so much away.
Since that time, we have confronted many challenges.
We have faced the realities of our old prejudices and tried to make
something new - for ourselves and our children.
Much of the past clings to us, as it must, to shape us and remind us of who we
are and how we came to be.
But even so, we committed ourselves, as a nation and as a people, to move
forward together, to transform South Africa.
And that transformation would require every institution in society: from the
courts: to parliament; to our religious institutions; to civil society; and the world
of business.
It would require a meaningful effort to make a new future by everyone
working towards redress and reconciliation for a more lasting impact.
There are a few imperatives: the need to make things better than they were
before; to uplift socio-economic opportunities, especially for those who were
denied them in the past; and to create a society where an individual can
access opportunity, be at liberty and make a better life for her or himself.
It is to live free and without discrimination and to help those who come from
disadvantaged conditions to access freedom through substantive help.
It is a project of social justice that seeks to make dignity for the individual a
reality.
We come from a history where people and communities were brutalised;
where we were poisoned by the idea that oppression and prejudice should
be the basis of social order.
It was a toxic place full of sadness, suspicion and pain.
It was a place where the very spirit of what makes us human was repressed.
We were all affected by the apartheid system but with a differing range of
experiences.
Some were imprisoned.
Some were tortured.
Some were sent into exile.
And some lost their lives.
While suffering is a relative concept, there can be no doubt that some paid a
very high price for the luxury of not only celebrating but enjoying human
rights.
For the City of Cape Town, the spirit of reconciliation is one that animates
and drives our levels of service delivery every day.
While there are many partners who must work towards social change,
governments have a particular role to play.
It is through their efforts that public resources and efforts can be directed to
achieve positive changes to our society by helping those in need, addressing
past imbalances, and creating a stable, inclusive space.
The private sector and civil society have their missions.
Variously, they serve to foster individual opportunity, fuel aspiration, provide
safeguards against state power and create a network of resilient
independence, amongst other things.
Combined, they work towards creating an organic society that is determined
by individual freedom, not collective design.
Whether we expend resources through capital expenditure or operational
expenditure, whether we install facilities to last or whether we provide
services to help, whether we deliver on an immediate mandate or invest in a
long-term legacy of goodwill, we work to bring the people of Cape Town
together.
In working to provide a greater distribution of resources to address the
mistakes of the past, we strive to build a better Cape Town and achieve the
reconciliation that Madiba has tried to teach us.
But perhaps his greatest lesson is the wisdom of fortitude, the recognition that
the road to our ambition is long and difficult.
It requires one step after another.
And it requires an understanding of what you can do at all levels of
government and society to address democracy and human rights.
In Africa, before around 1990, autocratic regimes and one-party states were
prevalent.
In 1990, only three countries had multi-party political systems, universal
suffrage, regular free elections and secret ballots. That has largely changed
today.
Today, even leaders like President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe officially go
to the polls.
We have learned from bitter experience that the trappings of democracy,
things like elections and term limits, do not automatically mean a nudge up
the development scale.
Elections can be rigged; terms limits can be changed; and electoral
competition can be the perfect breeding ground for mobilisations around
ethnic identity and the politics of patronage.
I don’t have easy solutions to these problems.
What I can tell you is that in South Africa, while we may still be a society in
transition, we try and live up to the extremely new institutions installed by our
constitution, which is less than 20 years old.
So we do have a free judiciary; we do have a free press; and we do have a
framework of law that protects the rights of the individual.
These things are sometimes attacked and not everyone believes in the
system because societies in transition face unavoidable challenges.
But the lesson from South Africa is that even the impossible is possible.
We made a conscious choice more than twenty years ago to form a new
society.
That compact was one made by leaders and it prescribed a way forward for
the country, sometimes counter to popular opinion - we adopted an
extremely liberal constitution in a conservative country.
And we did so because the way to a better future takes courage and strong
leadership above all.