False prophets and failed promises hurt the hope of Human Rights Day

FIVE years have elapsed since I last posted my feelings of what Tuesday meant to me.

Many of you were not born in 1960 when human beings stood and died for their rights to human dignity and waged a defiance campaign against an ideology that had foisted itself on the majority of blacks (including Indians and coloureds) at the barrel of a gun.

Every year since then the faithful have been celebrating a holy day when 69 people offered up their lives in the hope that true uhuru would embrace this tortured and abused nation.

We have a progressive Bill Rights, due to them.

Five years on I have to recognise that there has been change. People are no longer prepared to sit at home when injustice prances about the streets and mocks at those of us wallowing in a human-made struggle for the realisation of the provisions of that promissory note that Nelson Mandela signed into law and passed by the Constitutional Court in 1996. of

Of course we have a human rights-oriented constitution, and yes, more people have access to homes, health care, education and basic services, but these are still mere placebos if one notes the number of times the courts have exposed the spectacular failures beset by corruptionthat members of the ANC, few in government, have perpetrated! The Sassa judgment is the latest of them.

So we celebrate Human Rights Day each year in the sacred hope and belief that uhuru and ubuntu will manifest itself once the masses have truly imbibed the lessons of Sharpeville!

But we, the people, must serve a clear message to government and all political parties that we will democratically unseat a lapsed political party whose members are failing us.

So what was the lesson that exploded from Sharpeville that revisionists appropriate for party political points?

On that March 21 long ago, a breakaway group from the ANC, fed up with the inertia that plagued the movement at the time, mobilised thousands of people and stoked the fires of uhuru, and alerted the sleepers among the hopeful and the hopeless that possibly a new force was in embryo that would, to quote Omar Badsha, “liberate the oppressed people of South Africa”. Among these were the 69 who perished that day.

Yes, history , as he puts it, certainly “has a way of taking its toll on movements”, for like the PAC after Sobukwe, the ANC is led by leaders who lack Luthuli’s, Mandela’s, Mbeki’s and Tambo’s vision, commitment and integrity.

This week we paused to celebrate a day that “lives in infamy” on the epitaph of the Nats and is finding pollination at the behest of the very leaders whose party members were martyred on this day.

There are certainly those who derided and scoffed at what I wrote five years ago, at the suggestion that Mangaung was going to unearth a new movement, and the memory of the 69 who perished would not be celebrated once a year by false prophets! Enter the EFF and the growing popularity of the DA in the 2016 local government elections.

Human Rights Day, however, for me is still a farce, for these false prophets have laid siege to our freedoms by seeking to neuter the media, and to emasculate the power of the judiciary upon which they bury the raison d’être of their enduring failures, as the courts frequently remind us. SABER AHMED JAZBHAY

Durban