One of the biggest obstacles to a radically better future for the peoples of South Africa is squeamishness about the use of two words.
As a teenage boy, I grew up in the UK during the onset of the AIDS epidemic. A major global challenge in dealing with this emerging crisis was its association with the gay community and intravenous drug users. In those days, this placed the epidemic at the epicentre of British cultural taboos. The British Government took a radical approach. Believing that the key to saving lives was confronting these taboos rather than shying away from them, they launched one of the biggest public-health campaigns in history — “Don’t die of ignorance”.
It is easy to underestimate the courage it took to beseech the British public to “Use a condom” and “Don’t share a needle” back in the 1980s, but the British Government bombarded its people with these messages for months on end. The result was that the UK achieved one of the lowest HIV infection rates in Europe.
Today, South Africa’s political opposition, most notably but not uniquely the DA, find themselves in the same position as the British Government in the mid-80s.
The DA is a party who believes in subsidiarity and decentralisation. Along with federalism, it is their stated policy. They are campaigning for greater autonomy in the Western Cape, including control over policing, the ports, the railways, and electricity. Should they ever wrest control over any other province from the African nationalists, they will pursue autonomy there too. Federalism is in their heritage, with their political lineage commencing with the ‘Progressive Party’, which then became the ‘Progressive Federal Party’. Every one of these political objectives is a widely accepted and uncontroversial example of self-determination.
But for the DA, this is a problem. Counter-productively, they have chosen in their own minds to associate ‘self-determination’ with Eugène Terre’Blanche riding into town on a horse, an image they want no part of. Accordingly, they are unwilling to acknowledge that their pursuit of self-determination is in fact the pursuit of self-determination.
The result is the exact opposite of what the British Government achieved. Instead of confronting the taboo and, in doing so, outperforming their peers, they are shying away from it. The outcome is that the Western Cape’s unemployment rate is four times the OECD average, and its murder rate is more than twenty times greater. In the case of the latter, therefore, people in the Western Cape really are “dying of ignorance”.
South Africans, and particularly those in the political centre, seemingly need a lesson on the history and ethics of self-determination. The term neither started nor must end with Eugène Terre’Blanche.
Pivotal role
The right to self-determination has played a positive and pivotal role at the centre of the rules-based world order. It is the moral and legal counterpoint to ‘might-is-right’. It rose to prominence with Woodrow Wilson after WWI, it was a founding value of the United Nations, it was the legal basis upon which colonialism was brought to an end, and, despite its misuse by the apartheid government itself, it was the right which ultimately helped to end apartheid. It is now a peremptory norm (jus cogens) of international law, alongside the prohibition of genocide, apartheid, and slavery, and accordingly is considered so sacrosanct that no State may override it, and every State in the world holds a legal stake in seeing it upheld (erga omnes).
With a pedigree such as this, it is inconceivable that any political party trying to improve the lives of the people should shy away from using it because they believe it has negative connotations.
In a cruel irony, those most opposed to self-determination within South Africa throw the term around like confetti at a wedding. As a matter of course, South Africa asserts the right of its allies to self-determination in the international courts and on the international stage. Its foremost international advocate is the ANC itself, who, amongst others, has been outspoken for decades on the right of the Palestinians, Western Saharans, and South Sudanese to self-determination. Meanwhile, they refuse to devolve powers within South Africa even when their own statistics show, and the courts have found, that nationally controlled functions such as policing are dysfunctional and cannot fulfil the most basic constitutional mandate — to protect South Africans from violence and harm.
Right to self-determination
I have recently published a legal monograph explaining that control of policing in the Western Cape, control over language policy in schools, and tax federalism can all be achieved simply by asserting the right to self-determination. No change to the Constitution is required. The national government may subsequently be obliged to pass enabling legislation, but that obligation falls on the State, not on the community asserting its right. Critically, no parliamentary majority can legitimately deny it.
Tragically, it is not the law which is preventing a radical improvement in the lives of millions of South Africans, it is the unwillingness of our political leaders to use the two words which so positively transformed the international order throughout the twentieth century — self-determination.
[Image: by jacoblund]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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