I would have very much wanted to accept the kind invitation to participate in this conference and personally deliver this message.
 

Unfortunately, my family and my Party had long scheduled a large gathering today to celebrate my 80th Birthday and it would have been impossible for me not to attend it. Therefore, I have requested Dr LPHM Mtshali to deliver my message to this conference, knowing that you will recognise in him a proper and fitting ambassador not only of my words, but also my spirit.

It gives me great pleasure to convey to this Conference my message of support and wish to all those convened here today a successful outcome in your deliberations. I feel that there is a necessity and timeliness to the work of this conference.

After many decades of struggle, the achievement of our full liberation has been turbulent. Somehow we bypassed a necessary debate on who we really are and where we ought to go. Moreover, in the past 15 years, the pressure of governing and delivering services to our constituency has been such that we have not been able to engage in a serene debate on how we have fulfilled the promises of our Constitution and laid the foundation on which our Republic is hopefully to prosper for decades to come.

Now this debate can no longer be postponed. It does not affect the ruling party alone, but is indeed of paramount importance for the whole of South Africa. I therefore welcome that the issues of this debate are finally aired in a framework which I hope will be all inclusive and outward looking for the inputs of other people.

As you know, throughout my life I have championed constitutionalism and the notion that the respect of a good constitution is fundamental to ensure that those in power serve the people and not themselves. Our Constitution has been betrayed and in many respects obliterated.  Our democracy is ailing.  The people of South Africa have been forgotten.

Our liberation struggle has been high-jacked.

Under our Constitution, our Parliament ought to be central in the formation of policies, the making of laws and the governing of our country. Instead, our Parliament has been bypassed. The President of the country is fired and a new one selected elsewhere and Parliament is merely called upon to ratify this decision. 

The policies of government are formulated in an unaccountable executive committee comprising people who are not even elected, and are handed down to our departments of State which then transform them into laws which are in turn handed down to Parliament to adopt. In the past 15 years, Parliament has adopted hundreds of laws handed down to it without any substantial changes, perhaps with the exception of the legislation which I introduced when I was the Minister of Home Affairs for 10 years.

This top-down approach is not how our Constitution was meant to work.
 

Yet this is but a small part of an autocratic broader picture in which the powers which our Constitution distributed to a broad range of leaders, institutions and systems of checks and balances, or which it reserved for the people, have now been centralized in the hands of a few oligarchs. Provinces, premiers and provincial legislatures have been emasculated. Instead of being the centres of policy formulation which they were constitutionally supposed to be, provinces have become mere administrative implementers of what has been decided centrally and outside of public scrutiny in a conveyer belt of power and decision-making which leads straight into closed meetings of an executive committee which is not open to the public or accountable to Parliament.

The same conveyer belt of power extends beyond government and reaches into all segments of our civil society and economy. People are deployed from this closed centre of power into state companies and, through the influence of government and political power, into private companies, NGOs and many other organs of civil society alike. In this context the divides between ruling party and State, government and civil society, different branches and spheres of government and private and public interests have collapsed. 

All this enriches and empowers a few while disenfranchising and impoverishing the rest of our people. All this undermines the democracy promised in our Constitution, without which there cannot be any genuine development and prosperity, as the State is enslaved to deliver to a powerful oligarchy rather than serving the masses.  All this holds the kernel of unstoppable corruption.

The old habits of the apartheid regime seem to have seized those who have now risen to power, who look as if they have a similar contempt for democratic processes, progress and liberty, and the needs and aspirations of the majority of South Africans, who now remain as hopeless and powerless now as they were before 1994.  In a certain sense, we are even worse off now than we were before 1994, as we were then driven by hopes for a better future which now seems to have passed us by. We are at the point where it can almost be said that South Africa has a great future behind it!

If we are serious about redressing this lamentable state of affairs, we need to go back to the root causes of these problems. Somewhere, somehow, something went wrong in our liberation movement, and our struggle lost its original inspiration, its focus on our cause and its soul.  We must now regain what was lost so that it can guide our ongoing liberation. To do so, we must start from the premises that no one owns the ANC copyright or has the monopoly on the wisdom, inspiration and inner soul of our liberation movement. Our liberation movement can only succeed if it truly belongs to all the people of South Africa and receives their collective inspiration and serves them all.

Few people more than I could claim a special right to the ANC legacy, and yet I do not. The founding father of the ANC, Dr Pixley ka Isaka Seme, was my uncle. He, Inkosi Lutuli, Bishop Alpheus Zulu and other prominent founding fathers were my mentors. The ANC was founded and managed by my relatives and I never left the path in which I believe the ANC was founded and organized for many decades.  Inkosi Lutuli gained his Nobel Peace Price for his commitment to non-violence and the rule of law, which also inspired my forming Inkatha.

I formed Inkatha, after consulting Oliver Tambo, to complement the ANC's action when the ANC was banned and exiled. For this reason, when in 1979 Inkatha and the ANC broke apart, I made the statement - which I believe to still be valid and relevant - that in its conduct Inkatha remains more faithful to the founding values of the ANC than the ANC itself.
 

For instance, when way back in 1972 the then apartheid Minister of Police Jimmy Kruger threatened me requesting that Inkatha be an exclusively Zulu ethnic organization, I responded by saying that Inkatha was structured on the ideals of the ANC in 1912 and would not be such, no matter what the laws of apartheid were.

We are now at the stage in which the values underpinning our society are under threat. What we have today is a far cry from the future our forefathers promised us in 1912 and to which my generation dedicated its life of struggle. We must not leave this legacy, but preserve it as a pool of values to inspire future generations.

Our society must come together to talk about these values and should do so not only beyond political divides, but also beyond that which now divides the political world and civil society. Civil society is rightly becoming increasingly distant and disenchanted with politics. We must promote a new movement which, like the ANC in 1912, has the capacity to create an all-inclusive impetus towards the growth and development of democracy, and which gathers around it and respects the building blocks of our society, such as churches, traditional leadership and business. 

Many of these building blocks of our society have been coerced into a system of indirect rule which resonates of old colonials. The time has come to truly empower our provinces, municipalities, state owned companies, private companies, NGOs and other organs of civil society, and free them from the web of political power, influence and intrigue, so that in freedom and liberty they may provide their contribution towards our common prosperity. The time has come to free the State and the independent commissions established under our Constitution from political manipulation, so that may serve all.

This was the betrayed spirit of 1912, the Freedom Charter and our Constitution.  We must regain this spirit without fearing the freedom and liberty it promised for all.

I hope that this National Convention may focus on the fundamental value of our politics and the future of our Republic; for if we fail to empower the values of our liberation and those underpinning our Constitution in the running of our country, our common future is bleak indeed.

I, therefore, wish you well and look forward to reading the outcome of your deliberations. I thank you.

Contact: Dr Lionel Mtshali
083 256 4902