Ramaphosa delivers Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa says addressing the land question in the country will give South Africans chance to heal the wounds of the past.

He delivered the eighth annual Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture in front of a packed Artscape theatre last night.

Throughout his life, Archbishop Tutu has been a soldier for peace, said Ramaphosa.

Tutu celebrated his 87th birthday on Sunday.

The president spoke about restorative justice in South Africa 20 years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Tutu chaired.

“The dispossession of black people of their land manifested itself in a violent manner, bereft of any notions of peace. Apartheid stripped black people – Africans, coloureds and Indians – of their land and their assets, impoverishing families for generations and robbing them of their dignity. The evictions of farm workers, especially here in the Western Cape, continues unabated,” he said.

Ramaphosa said it was vital “to restore the dignity of our people and break the cycle of poverty, that we address the land question so that there can be peace and prosperity among our people”.

“It is in this context that we must understand the drive to accelerate land reform through redistribution, restitution and tenure security. It is in the interests of both social justice and economic development that we ensure that the land is shared among all those who work it and all those who need it,” he said.

Effective land reform, where emerging farmers are provided with adequate support and poor households receive well-located land for housing in urban centres, is both a moral and economic imperative, he said.

He said the country also needed to fundamentally transform gender relations.

“We cannot have a free society, we cannot have a peaceful world for as long as women are discriminated against, exploited, neglected and abused. We will not be able to say we have achieved freedom for all our people until we have corrected the historical injustice of accumulation by a minority, on the basis of dispossession of the majority.”

Ramaphosa said President Nelson Mandela and Tutu have been beacons of hope, not only to South Africans struggling under the yoke of racial oppression, but also to the billions of people across the world who yearn for a future that is peaceful and stable.