The Revolution will Guarantee Individual and Equal Rights

(Extract from the January 8 Statement, delivered by African National Congress President Oliver Tambo, 1987)

We must unite all these forces, both Black and White, around the democratic perspective for which so many people have already laid down their lives. Once more, we reaffirm that in the new South Africa the people – all the people – shall govern. We shall, together, translate that fundamental democratic principle into the practice whereby each person shall have the right both to vote and to voted to any elective organ in the new united and non-racial South Africa.

For us, it is of special importance that that new reality should reinforce what we are accomplishing now, in struggle: the building of a nation of South Africans. It must reflect and enhance our oneness, breaking down the terrible and destructive idea and practice of defining our people by race, colour or ethnic group. The revolution will guarantee the individual and equal rights of all South Africans without regard to any of these categories, and include such freedoms as those of speech, assembly, association, language, religion, the press, the inviolability of family life and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention without trial. For all this, the victorious revolution demand and must ensure thoroughgoing democratic practice.

For its own success, it imposes the obligation that all should be free to form and join any party of their choice, without let or hindrance. But as a people and a movement, we must state it clearly that democracy in our country cannot succeed if it permits the organised propagation of ideas of fascism, racism and ethnicity. Apart from our own experience, we cannot, in the name of democracy, tolerate the organised sustenance of conceptions which led to the Second World War and which have since been categorised and dealt with as a crime against humanity.

Of central importance also is the critical requirement that the new South Africa must guarantee the masses of our people freedom from hunger, disease, ignorance, homelessness and poverty. The democratic state will be representative of all the people of our country, and especially the ordinary working people who own neither land nor factories and neither the mines nor the banks. It will therefore be called upon to ensure that the wealth of our country increases significantly and continuously and that it is shared equitably by all the people to ensure their material and spiritual upliftment and well-being.

To achieve these objectives, the new democratic order will necessarily have to address the question of ownership, control and direction of the economy as a whole to ensure that neither the public nor the private sectors serve as a means of enriching the few at the expense of the majority.

THE TRANSFER OF POWER TO THE PEOPLE MUST THEREFORE BE ACCOMPANIED BY THE DEMOCRATISATION OF THE CONTROL AND DIRECTION OF THE ECONOMY SO THAT INDEED THE PEOPLE SHARE IN THE WEALTH OF OUR COUNTRY, FOR THE COMMON GOAL.

– ANC President Oliver Tambo (1987)

Castro Khwela
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