Source: President of South Africa –
Programme Director,
Ministers and Deputy Ministers,
Veterans of our struggle,
Leaders of our future,
Distinguished Guests,
Fellow South Africans,
Sanibonani. Dumelang. Avuxeni. Molweni. Ndi matsheloni. Lotjhani. Goeie môre. Good morning.
It is a profound honour to stand before you today to launch the Milestones of Freedom programme.
Over the course of the next year, our nation will together remember where we have come from. We will honour those who carried us here. And we will renew the promise we made to one another at the dawn of our democracy.
In the span of a few short months, the calendar of our history brings together four anniversaries that, woven together, tell a story of who we are as a people.
They speak of oppression and dispossession, of courage and resistance, and of restoration and rebuilding.
Seventy years ago, on the 9th of August 1956, in the very place that we gather today, some 20,000 women of every colour and creed converged to demand an end to injustice and discrimination.
They came from the cities and the countryside, from the factories and the farms, many with their children strapped to their backs.
They came to say to the apartheid state, in a single defiant voice, that they would not carry the hated dompas.
They stood in silence for thirty minutes. And then they sang the words that have echoed through the decades: Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo. You strike the women, you strike a rock.
We pay tribute to the women who carried thousands of petitions to the door of Prime Minister JG Strijdom: Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophie De Bruyn.
We remember the thousands whose names history did not record but whose courage built the foundation on which our democracy stands.
Those women taught us that there can be no freedom for our nation while half of our people are not free.
Today, we honour those women not only with our words, but with our determination to finish the work they began.
Sixty years ago, in February 1966, the apartheid government declared District Six in Cape Town a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act.
In the years that followed, more than 60,000 people were torn from their homes, their shops, their mosques and their churches, and scattered across the Cape Flats.
A vibrant and diverse community – a place where people of many faiths and origins had lived side by side for generations – was reduced to rubble.
The people of District Six were not alone in their fate.
Across our country, over many decades, the same cruelty was unleashed upon the people of Sophiatown, of Cato Manor and of countless other places whose names are written in the memories of the dispossessed.
Today, as families return to the land that was stolen from them, we are reminded of our solemn responsibility to achieve redress for all the people of our land.
Fifty years ago, on the 16th of June 1976, the children of Soweto walked out of their classrooms and into history.
They were schoolchildren who refused to be taught in the language of their oppressor. They refused to bend their knee to a system designed to keep them in servitude.
Their peaceful protest was answered with teargas, bullets, arrest and torture.
We will never forget the young people who fell that day in Soweto, and in the days and years that followed across this land.
The youth of 1976 changed the course of our history. They showed the world that a system built on injustice could not endure forever.
They reminded us that young people are not only the leaders of tomorrow. They are the conscience, the voice and the pioneers of the present.
Thirty years ago, on the 8th of May 1996 – having endured all these hardships, having resisted the pass laws, the forced removals and the injustice of Bantu Education, and having fought a courageous struggle for freedom – the people of South Africa adopted a new democratic Constitution.
The Constitution begins with the words: ‘We, the people of South Africa.’
In doing so, the Constitution reaffirms the fundamental principle that this country belongs to all who live in it, black and white, united in our diversity.
Our Constitution declared that we would heal the divisions of the past.
That we would establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.
That every person – regardless of race, gender or belief – would be equal before the law and equal in dignity.
This Constitution is our inheritance from the generations of freedom fighters who came before us, and it is the birthright we hold in trust for those who come after us.
When we remember these milestones, we do not see them as artefacts of the past.
We see them as the foundations on which we need to build.
They are a reminder of the work we still have to do.
There are still South Africans who go to bed hungry, still young people without work, still communities living in fear of criminals.
There are still South Africans waiting for the dignity that freedom promised.
We do not gather here to declare that our long walk to freedom is complete.
Rather we gather here to acknowledge the great progress that we have achieved together as free South Africans, and affirm our commitment to complete the task that history has bestowed upon us.
Since the dawn of democracy, millions who lived in darkness now have electricity.
Millions who carried water from distant rivers now have clean water flowing from a tap. Together, we have built millions of homes and thousands of clinics and schools.
Through the provision of social grants and free basic services, we have improved the quality of life of children, the elderly, persons with disabilities and families across the country.
For the women of South Africa, we have opened doors that were once bolted shut.
Women hold positions of leadership in government, in our courts, in our boardrooms, in our universities and colleges, and in many other areas of our national life.
We have done much to advance the education of the girl child, achieving gender parity in access to schooling and seeing female learners excelling in matric and in further studies.
We have put in place laws and programmes that advance the position of women in the workplace and in the economy more broadly.
We have placed the fight against gender-based violence and femicide at the centre of our national agenda, because a country where women are not safe is a country that is not yet free.
The work is far from done, but we can say that through our collective efforts the daughters of Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophie de Bruyn are rising.
For our young people, we have made school accessible to more children than ever before, with no-fee schools and daily meals for those who would otherwise learn on an empty stomach.
Through financial aid, we have opened the gates of universities and colleges to the children of workers and the poor.
And we are investing in the skills, the enterprises and the opportunities that turn the potential of young South Africans into meaningful livelihoods.
We have made great progress in returning the land to its original owners through our land restitution process. We have undertaken extensive redistribution of white-owned agricultural land to black farmers. We have given many rural dwellers security of tenure.
Despite this progress, this work is not complete. We are committed to continue until we can say with confidence that the land belongs to all who work it and need it.
This is what freedom has built.
The Milestones of Freedom programme is a recommitment. It calls us to the work that remains.
It calls us to grow an economy that includes everyone, not only the few.
To achieve this, we are removing the obstacles to investment, fixing our energy supply, rebuilding our ports and railways, and backing the small businesses and entrepreneurs who create the most jobs.
An economy that is inclusive and growing – that reaches every township and village – is the surest instrument we have against poverty.
An economy that creates jobs, particularly for young people, is the greatest guarantor of a secure and prosperous future.
We continue to expand the pathways from the classroom to the workplace.
We are strengthening our partnerships with business, labour and civil society so that no young South African is left to wait, year after year, for a chance that never comes.
We are intensifying the fight against poverty and hunger, protecting the most vulnerable while creating the job opportunities that allow families to stand on their own.
We are focused on the education that shapes a child’s destiny.
We are investing in early learning, lifting the quality of our schools and equipping our young people for the world they will inherit.
And we are building a health system that serves all our people, ensuring that access to quality health care is never again determined by a person’s ability to pay.
We are working to confront crime and corruption without fear or favour, because South Africans deserve to feel safe in their homes and on their streets.
We are rebuilding our police, our prosecution service and all our law enforcement institutions.
We are pursuing those who stole from the people, because money looted through corruption is money taken from a clinic, a classroom, a child.
We are building a capable, ethical state that serves the people, a state where public representatives and officials understand that they are there to serve citizens.
We do this work in a spirit of partnership.
The milestones we honour this year were made by ordinary people, working together, who decided that they would not rely on others to determine their fate.
That is the spirit we must rekindle. Freedom is not a monument we visit once a year.
It is a responsibility we carry every day.
So today we issue a call to activism, a call to service, a call to participate.
This is a call to all of us, to volunteer in a school, to mentor a young person, to clean a street, to grow a business.
It is a call to serve on a school governing body, to report corruption, to prevent violence against women.
It is a call to vote in every election and to hold to account those that are elected into public office.
This is a call to register to vote this weekend, on the 20th and 21st of June.
If we are to honour those who came before us, we should all of us be active participants in the National Dialogue that is taking place across the country.
We must attend the public dialogues that are going to take place in our wards, in our sectors and in our organisations.
We should add our voice to the millions of people who will be charting a new way forward for our country.
This nation belongs to all of us, and it will be only as strong, as just and as free as we are willing to make it.
As we launch the Milestones of Freedom, let us hold all four of these anniversaries in our hands at once: the women, the children and the dispossessed and the Constitution that turned their dreams into a promise of a better future.
We are the inheritors of their courage. We are the keepers of their dream.
And we are, every one of us, the authors of what South Africa will become.
Let us, together, build the South Africa of which our forebears dared to dream, united in our diversity, equal in our dignity and free at last.
May God bless South Africa.
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.
God seën Suid-Afrika.
Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afurika.
Hosi katekisa Afrika.
I thank you.
