NEWS & MEDIA LETTERS FROM THE PRESIDENT

"South Africans of all races will vote for a people's contract"

[ Previous Letters ]

THIS IS the last edition of ANC TODAY ahead of the April 14th elections. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to wish all our people peaceful and successful elections. Once more we urge all the political parties contesting the elections to do everything possible to contribute to this outcome.

We also extend our best wishes to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) and its entire staff to continue to discharge its responsibilities to our country and people to ensure that we hold and free elections, as it has done in the past. We will also continue to count on all our country's security forces and agencies to support the IEC in this regard.

We would also like to urge that all the political parties participating in the elections should deploy party agents in the voting stations as provided for in the IEC procedures. This must be done to assist the IEC to ensure that the elections are both free and fair and are accepted by all, including the political parties, as having been free and fair.

It is clear that some parties are preparing for their possible defeat in a special way. They are hoping that they can concoct sufficient "evidence" to argue that their defeat is due to fraudulent activity.

The deployment of party agents, who will monitor the voting process and verify the vote count, will play an important part in defeating the schemes of those who, for purely partisan purposes, will try to discredit our hard-won democratic system by attempting to deny the fact of their rejection by the people.

Again, the security forces, working with the people and all organised formations committed to the protection of the democratic victory, will have to do their best to ensure that these party agents are not exposed to violence and intimidation by those who want to win votes by resort to illegal means.

As we have said before, our country enters its Second Decade of Liberation with great possibilities to record important victories in the continuing struggle to defeat poverty and underdevelopment. And as our movement has said, this will require, among other things, that our country unite in a people's contract to bring together the capacities of all our people to confront the common challenge to build a winning nation.

The achievement of this objective demands that we ensure that the government that leads our country derives its legitimacy from the free expression of the will of the people. This obliges us to ensure that the forthcoming elections are truly free and fair, and are accepted by the masses of our people as having been truly free and fair.

This will enhance the possibility for the new government to mobilise the people into the united national movement for progressive change represented by the concept of a people's contract.

The question of the response of the people to the national challenges of our democracy has been one of the central issues defining the role and place of the various political formations in the reconstruction and development of our country. Naturally, the 2004 elections have brought this matter to the fore, as each of these formations has sought to win the support of the people.

Throughout its history, the ANC has understood and projected the view that our people, black and white, are confronted by a number of common challenges. Convinced that our country belongs to all who live in it and that, regardless of differences of race, colour and culture, our citizens share a common destiny, our movement has for more than nine decades fought for the unity of all our people in the struggle to determine that shared destiny.

Pixley ka Isaka Seme presented this view as early as 1911 when he and his fellow patriots were working to convene the founding conference of the ANC on January 8th, 1912. In an article in the newspaper "Imvo Zabantsundu", explaining the purposes of the "Native Union" that was still to be, he wrote: "There is today among all races and men a general desire for progress, and for cooperation, because cooperation will facilitate and secure that progress.Cooperation is the key and the watchword which opens the door, the everlasting door which leads into progress and all national success. The greatest success shall come when man shall have learned to cooperate, not only with his own kith and kin, but with all peoples and with all life."

The 1944 Manifesto of the ANC Youth League contains the following interesting observation: "The African regards the Universe as one composite whole; an organic entity, progressively driving towards greater harmony and unity, whose individual parts exist merely as interdependent aspects of one whole, realising their fullest life in the corporate life where communal contentment is the absolute measure of values. His philosophy of life strives towards unity and aggregation; towards greater social responsibility."

In its January 8th, 1982 Statement marking the 70th anniversary of our movement, the ANC NEC said: "We have striven for seven decades to build one common nationhood with one destiny.All of us - workers, peasants, students, priests, chiefs, traders, teachers, civil servants, poets, writers, men, women and youth, black and white, must take our common destiny into our own hands."

In the document "Ready to Govern", adopted at the 1992 National Conference of the ANC, we said: "We have to develop a truly South African vision of our country, one which is not distorted by the prejudices and sectarianism that have guided viewpoints on race and gender in the past. We have to rely on the wisdom, life experiences, talents and know-how of all South Africans, men and women. There can be no 'apartheid' in finding solutions to the problems created by apartheid."

The sentiments expressed so eloquently in 1911, 1944, 1982 and 1992, for cooperation with all peoples and all life, for unity and aggregation, for building one common nationhood with one destiny, for the development of a truly South African vision of our country, find their expression today in the people's contract that our movement has presented to our country.

Opposed to this perspective in whose defence many sacrificed their lives, is the view advanced by some of the political formations in our country that the central task facing the masses of our country is to divide into two opposing political factions that must engage in an endless struggle to gain supremacy one over the other.

Our movement upholds the view that the central challenge facing the masses of our people is voluntarily to use the space created by our democratic system to act in unity "to build one common nationhood with one destiny".

Our opponents propagate the view that the masses of our people should use this space to polarise themselves into contending entities with no shared destiny. They characterise the entrenched national division for which they are working as the very essence of our democracy.

White minority power in our country, in all its forms and manifestations, was necessarily always founded on the division and polarisation of our people and the denial of our common nationhood, sharing one destiny.

Whereas our movement has always urged progress for our country achieved through cooperation "among all races and men", our oppressors have treated this movement as an opponent that must be defeated and destroyed.

Thus they decreed that not only the survival of the system of white minority rule, but also the very welfare of white society depended on the interaction between our movement and themselves as opposing entities.

This approach finds expression today in the view advanced by some opposition parties that the litmus test defining whether we have a genuine democracy or not is the strength of the Opposition, and therefore the division of our country into permanently antagonistic camps.

The principal task of this Opposition is then defined as opposing everything the government does, with no concern about participating in the effort to address the fundamental challenge our country faces to eradicate the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.

This leads naturally to the result that the weakening of the ANC, "cutting it down to size", has become the beginning and the end of the campaigns of these opposition parties, rather than the projection of their programmes. This opposition at all costs will then be extended to the period after the elections.

The ANC is determined to unite our people in the struggle to build a non-racial society, speaking for all South Africans. However, some among the Opposition are equally determined to emphasise our racial and ethnic divisions, to polarise our country along these lines, informed by the "prejudices and sectarianism" of the past.

To this end, these opposition parties claim special status as representatives not of our people as a whole, but of particular ethnic or racial groups. They argue against affirmative action, such interventions as the Employment Equity Act, minimum wages and other measures for the protection of workers' rights.

They assert that individual merit should be the determinant of what happens to each South African, knowing very well that the persisting impact of the legacy of the past denies the majority of our population the possibility to compete on an equal basis with those who were advantaged by the apartheid system.

All this is nothing but a camouflaged message that black upliftment is contrary to the interests of the white section of our population. By this means, these opposition groupings indicate their opposition to the perspective projected by the ANC that "there can be no 'apartheid' in finding solutions to the problems created by apartheid."

They continue to advance a particular view about what we should do with our democracy, basing themselves on what the ANC characterised as an approach that is "distorted by the prejudices and sectarianism that have guided viewpoints on race and gender in the past."

Necessarily therefore, one of the central issues that will face the electorate during the 2004 Elections will be to decide whether we want to conduct ourselves as a diverse but united nation, or prefer to divide ourselves into polarised and competing political, ethnic and racial factions.

The electorate will have to decide whether it agrees with the ANC when it says that to achieve our goal of providing a better life for all, "we have to rely on the wisdom, life experiences, talents and know-how of all South Africans, men and women" and that all of us "workers, peasants, students, priests, chiefs, traders, teachers, civil servants, poets, writers, men, women and youth, black and white, must take our common destiny into our own hands."

The votes this electorate will cast on April 14 will indicate whether it believes that we should perpetuate the racial, ethnic and gender divisions of the past, making the statement that we should use the apartheid divisions of the past to "find solutions to the problems created by apartheid."

The key challenge facing our electorate is not whether our country should have "a strong opposition" or not, responding to a fictional threat of a one-party state. The key question is whether our people, black and white, men and women, are ready to give further impetus to the process of national reconciliation by acting together in unity in a people's contract focused on building a caring, people-centred and winning nation.

We have no doubt that South Africans of all races will vote to return the ANC to power with a decisive majority, and thus vote in favour of the people 's contract that will further reinforce the process of national reconciliation for the promotion of social transformation.

By this means, our people will make the unequivocal statement that they reject the dismal vision of some of those who define themselves as the Opposition, of a South Africa that would continue to be characterised by the divisions, tensions and conflicts deliberately created and entrenched by the apartheid system.