Freedom Day is ‘nothing to celebrate’
AS THE country commemorated Freedom Day, marking 28 years since the first democratic elections on April 27, 1994, and 25 years since the birth of the Constitution, ordinary citizens and analysts felt there was nothing to celebrate.
Leading what should be a “national celebration”, President Cyril Ramaphosa reminded the country not to forget the terrible past from which we have come, nor forget the many sacrifices made by patriots.
“Our Constitution protects everyone’s rights. Our Bill of Rights is centred on affirming human dignity, equality, and freedom. Track our progress in delivering on this commitment to ensure that no one is left behind,” he said at a national Freedom Day commemoration yesterday in Kees Taljaard Stadium in Middelburg, Mpumalanga.
Durban University of Technology, Njabulo Mabena, felt that the romanticised freedom was not benefiting the layman.
“Although today we have access to education, and people are free to express themselves in ways that they could not in the past, poverty, and unemployment has been rocketing after being given the so-called freedom. It now boils down to who you know in order to get opportunities,” Mabena said.
Zululand University student Thabang Nzuza said: “It is very disheartening to see that there is still no equality, whites live far better today compared to black people. Freedom Day was supposed to be not only a celebration of a right to vote but also a celebration of the diversity, and equality that the real heroes died fighting for, but we are seeing the opposite.
Political analyst and senior lecturer at the University of Limpopo, Dr Meitji Makgoba, argued that oppression of the majority in the country, remained and therefore Freedom Day meant nothing to the poor.
“For black people, freedom means accepting their positions of constraints with the structure of racial capitalism that only sees whiteness as normative and white people as the only category of the human. This suggests freedom, which is limited to liberal rights, means the integration of black people into institutionally oppressive structures of racialised power that produced white advantages and black disadvantages,” he said.
Independent political analyst and professor at the Unisa, Tumi Senokoane, said: “Freedom can never be understood as an event but rather as a process. If we were to mistake it as an event we would not be appreciative of the sacrifices of our forefathers and the gains thereof. “However, if we understand freedom as a process we shall appreciate that it happened yesterday, it happens today but that it does not end today but becomes a continuous unending process.”