Hon Chairperson, hon Ministers and hon members, Freedom Day commemorations remind us of the heavy price our struggle heroes and heroines, both dead and alive, paid for our freedom. This day provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the challenges facing us today and the progress we have made since the advent of democracy in 1994.
However, before we begin the process of mobilising society towards consolidating democracy and freedom, as today's theme suggests, we should first measure and analyse the performance of our democracy in accordance with key procedural dimensions of democratic quality, such as the rule of law, citizen participation, electoral competition as well as horizontal and vertical accountability.
In doing so, we must, from the outset admit that significant progress has been made with respect to the first three of the five above mentioned procedural dimensions of democratic quality. For instance, we have over the past 19 years worked hard to uphold the principle of the rule of law and to ensure that our laws are fairly and consistently applied to all citizens, even though there were a few incidents in the past where the principle of legal egalitarianism did not apply.
There is adequate competition between our various political parties, albeit under conditions which often tend to favour the governing party.
Citizens' right to political participation is also firmly entrenched, in that, our people have the political rights to vote, organise, assemble, protest and lobby for their interests, among others.
Despite these remarkable strides, political accountability in South Africa remains a major challenge. We have a problem with elected political parties, particularly leaders who get away with either failing or refusing to answer to the electorate for their political decisions. This failure to account and consult the public on political decisions is so widespread in government and it has resulted in the failure of democracy at local government level. These shortcomings have led our people to resort to violent protests to get their voices heard.
We saw this recently when the residents of Zamdela Township near Sasolburg in the Free State burnt tyres, barricaded roads and looted shops trying to voice their anger at the proposed merger of the Metsimaholo Municipality with Ngwathe Municipality in Parys. Other townships across the country also resort to the same violent protests to get their voices heard.
Apart from this vertical example of accountability, horizontal accountability is hopelessly inadequate. Democracy is subverted when, for instance, the executive provides misinformation to this House in order to obtain approval for some of their dubious decisions. I thank you.