30 YEARS OF DEMOCRACY
DEMOCRACY is an experiment. The nature of this experiment depends on each country’s socio-political history. Regular elections have become the defining feature of the democratic process.
In South Africa, the promise of democracy was eloquently captured by none other than Nelson Mandela in his Rivonia Trial speech in 1964. Mandela remarked that he “cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”.
Thirty years into democracy, the promise is yet to be realised. If anything, Africans finds themselves at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Nowhere is the intensity of human destitution more than in African communities.
