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ANC PR: Voting ends an era
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Date: Tue, 26 Apr 94 15:14:36 SAS
From: tim jenkin
THE BEGINNING - NOT THE END This week's voting is truly the end of an era. Finally, the days of minority government and exclusion of black citizens from an responsible role in the affairs of the country are over. Good riddance.
The election which brings that bleak and strife-torn era to an end also signals the start of a new age. Ahead of us lies unknown territory, in which everything has to be done again, every social and economic institution reconsidered. We are at the very beginning, when everything has to be born again - the relations between peoples, the constitution, the law, the economy, the way we work and the way we live. It will be a searching test of our national character. Our ability to enlist all the national resources, material and human, to remake our society, is now challenged.
The ANC approaches that challenge with high hope and with confidence. In the last days of the period behind us, we have had confirmation from all around the country of a readiness to accept a new society without racism. We have had confirmation that the majority of South Africans are now bold enough and confident enough to discard age-old predjudices which once seemed to be cast in stone. We have proved our national capacity to carry through a pioneering constitutional transition despite all the unbelieveable complexities caused by inexperience and race division.
We are now entitled to claim with pride: We have done it. Together, without any previous experience and in the teeth of opposition from right-wing extremists of all colours, we have carried through an electoral change without precedence anywhere in the world. We have done it. And therefore we should enter the future with confidence and hope.
We are entitled to have confidence in the ANC and its allies, for they have led a long, hard struggle for change, against all the odds. There is now a deep nation-wide desire for the emergence of a just social and economic order, which has been at the heart of the whole election debate. Every party in its own way has put forward proposals for meeting it. We are entitled to be confident that hope will become the common goal of the whole nation in the new South Africa which is being born this week.
It is never easy to step out from an old and well understood environment into the unknown. But those who would explore a new world must do so without fear. At least to our generation of South Africans, everything about this new era is unknown. We have no experience of universal democracy, of government of national unity, or of non-racial economic development. But we can step off without fear, for we have proved that, as a nation, we have the maturity, tolerance and adaptability to take on the new, and adapt ourselves to it. The atmosphere of order and general peacefulness in which we have made the change has astonished all the doubters in our own country and abroad. There were wild predictions that civil war and chaos would accompany any attempt at non-racial democratic elections. They were false. Only a lunatic right-wing fringe tried to fulfil their own predictions through a murderous but futile campaign of terror.
And again now, as the new era dawns, there are lurid predictions of national chaos to follow. It is being predicted that the rate of exchange will soar, capital will flee the country and the economy will collapse; that mobs will run wild, looting and seizing property. Those rumours, like the bombs placed by crazed saboteurs, are intended to destablise and frighten. They have no more basis in reality than the earlier dire pre-election predictions of civil war.
The reality is different. The real prospect for South Africa is one of development and progress, of economic growth and of peace. This is now being acknowledged throughout the world. President Clinton promises "a considerable increase in American help and support" in building our economy and new political system. US Secretary of Commerce sees this country as "one of the world's 10 big emerging markets". They are reading the signs. Our future inspires them with confidence, as it should inspire us.
There is going to be a new era. But if its promise is to be realised, the fears of the doomsayers must be put asid. We need to go forward with confidence that we can bury for ever the old era with all its divisions, tensions and conflict; confidence to step off into the unknown to create the new South Africa.
Tomorrow we start on the redevelopment and reconstruction of the country, to create a single nation, and to provide jobs, homes, health and security for all its people. It will be a formidable task, which will take all the enthusiasm, energy and dedication we can muster.
But the ANC believes that, without doubt, together we can do it. That we have now proved. We need only to put fear behind us, and set to work with confidence. For reconstruction and reconciliation. For a better life for all South Africans. That better future begins today. Issued by the Department of Information and Publicity P.O.Box 61884 Marshalltown 2107, Johannesburg 26th April 1994 ```
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