Mayor Tau: Constitution needs to be revisited

20 April 2016

 

 

South Africa needed to revisit the Constitution – especially the clauses that focused on the economy – for the country to deal effectively with racial tensions, Johannesburg Executive Mayor Councillor Parks Tau said this week.

 

Mayor Tau was speaking at the Community Peace Building dialogue, an initiative championed by the City of Johannesburg and the Mail & Guardian newspaper, at the Joburg Theatre in Braamfontein on Monday night.

The dialogue session evoked robust debate that sparked a few radical ideas on how South Africa could move away from its apartheid past. The discussion was moderated by Milisuthando Bongela, the M&G’s award-winning Arts Editor. The panel included Mayor Tau; Councillor Nonceba Molwele, Member of the Mayoral Committee for Health and Social Development; Father Molefe Oliphant, Chairperson of the Johannesburg Faith-Based Organisation; Dr Anusha Naidu, of the Matthew Goniwe School of Leadership; Roshan Dadoo, Director of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa; Sarah Motha, of the Foundation of Human Rights; and Philani Ndebele, of the Action Support Centre.

The debate was aimed at answering the question: How can we shape understanding and promote mutual caring between diverse communities in South Africa?
The panellists agreed that South Africans needed to have difficult and racially inclusive conversations “with the people who own 97% of wealth” because, as Bongela put it, “there are too many elephants in the room”, ranging from structural racism and xenophobia to gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, which had led to the ongoing student protests.

Social cohesion would only work when all races were included, the panellists said. Mayor Tau said at the heart of racial tensions was the lack of access to the economy, which continued the subjugation of the black majority. The Mayor said the guarantees in the Constitution around the economy made it impossible to change the status quo, which saw the economy continue to be concentrated in a few white hands.

He said radical economic transformation was needed to change this. Racism was about the control of the economy and power.

“We need to disrupt the structural ownership patterns of the economy and radically change to these ownership patterns. We need to create access to prosperity for all and move beyond the B-BBEE Codes to get to the heart of what protects these ownership patterns. Our responsibility as civil society, business and the media is: How we can create a more prosperous South Africa?"

“We need to have the uncomfortable conversation about how we got here. We need to disrupt the economic system … We must go back to the constitutional principles and interrogate [economic] ownership patterns [as included in the sunset clause]. We then need to disrupt that system if we are to make any progress. To rescue South Africa from this problem, we need to have the right people around the table [to discuss this honestly] the Brenthurst and Stellenbosch groups. Unless we go back to the basics, we won’t solve the problem [of racism and inequality]."

Dr Naidu agreed, saying even in education apartheid was still holding back transformation.

“Freedom is not an event … We may have neglected critical dialogue along the way.”

MMC Molwele said society had not yet completely healed from the effects of apartheid.

“We need to admit to ourselves that we’re not completely healed. We must have on-going dialogue and we must be realistic about what we want to achieve. Social justice is needed,” she said.

Ndebele said it was important to acknowledge that even 20 years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, there was no closure for most South Africans. Nation building would help but economic access, land redress and strong leadership were paramount.

“We’re in a system that feeds on the chaos [in leadership]. Social cohesion is one-sided. The state is so comfortable that it has disengaged. We must define the transformation we want to see and begin to implement the things we agree on.”

Dadoo said interplay between race and class, increasing inequality and poverty, especially among blacks, needed to be addressed. Bongela and Ndebele stressed that inter-generational debates were also important because the youth felt the elders were not listening to them.