Durban - The country commemorated Freedom Day, marking 28 years since the first democratic elections on April 27, 1994, and 26 years since the Constitution came into being, 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 to forget the many sacrifices made by patriots to ensure democracy and freedom.
“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.
The president led a national Freedom Day commemoration on Wednesday in Kees Taljaard Stadium in Middelburg, Mpumalanga.
In contrast to Ramaphosa’s sentiments about the protection of everyone’s dignity, equality, and freedom, a student at the Durban University of Technology, Njabulo Mabena, felt that the “romanticised” freedom was not benefiting the person on the ground.
“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, have been skyrocketing after being given the so-called freedom. It now boils down to who you know in order to get opportunities.
“Yes, people may now be free in some aspects such as being expressive in their sexuality, however, I believe that we are far from being economically liberated. We are still being denied opportunities based on the colour of our skin. There are very fewer and limited resources and people live under extreme conditions of poverty,” Mabena said.
Zululand University student Thabang Nzuza said that many black people were still facing hardships and being discriminated against because of their skin colour.
“It is very disheartening to see that there is still no equality, whites live far better today compared to black people. This freedom ensured them a comfortable life and protected their interests at the expense of black people. The continued killings of blacks by white farmers cannot be celebrated.”
Nzuza added: “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.”
He concluded by encouraging the youth to educate themselves about this day through history books as well as visiting apartheid museums to learn the true history of the country.
Political analyst and senior lecturer at the University of Limpopo, Dr Meitji Makgoba, argued that the oppression of the majority in the country remained intact, 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. And the role of these liberal rights, as enshrined in the Constitution, has been to cement the turn to full-blown neoliberalism which paradoxically negates the promise of equality and freedom and any radical politics.”
Makgoba believed that accepting the Bill of Rights while leaving intact the various structures of apartheid capitalism meant that the people had abandoned their emancipation in favour of the civilising mission of Western democracy and global capitalism.
He continued: “The conception of rights in these conditions reduces power to redistribution rather than something that organises economic, political, and social relations. This has displaced the link between economic power and political power since party politics does not necessarily contribute to restructuring the political economy.”
Makgoba concluded by stating that there was a false understanding that the oppression of black people ended with the installation of liberal democracy.
Independent political analyst and professor at the University of South Africa, Tumi Senokoane, argued that the meaning of freedom was not the same between the rich and the poor or for black people.
“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,” said Senokoane.
Daily News