President, Chairperson, the following is the opening paragraph of a recent newspaper report: Five men who sought to set up a political party to oppose the apartheid regime have finally been released from a Pretoria jail after serving four years without trial on charges of treason.
I am sure this sounds familiar. This kind of story must be very familiar to many of us in this Chamber and outside. It brings back bad memories of fearful days gone by. We feel sad, we feel angry and we want to do something about the matter. It is also the kind of story that made the whole world stand up against apartheid until it was defeated.
Fortunately, I made up that story by substituting "apartheid regime" and "Pretoria" - the words in the parts of a story that I would now like to share with this House. Fortunately, the story was published in the Sowetan newspaper on Tuesday, 7 June 2011, and I have a copy of that story here.
Under the heading "Free after jail agony" and the subtitle "Five Zim detainees tell of their four years of hell", written by John Roth of The Times, London, here are the relevant parts of the story:
Five men who sought to set up a political party to oppose President Robert Mugabe have finally been released from a Harare jail after serving four years without trial on charges of treason.
Of their four years and a day in custody, two years were spent in solitary confinement. All five men were badly beaten and tortured while in prison. On 29 May 2007, the six were abducted from the Harare Travel Agency, where most of them work, by 15 men in plain clothes with AK47 rifles.
The former prisoners claim that it took a month to force the prisons department to summon a doctor to examine their injuries. The doctor produced a detailed report for the court and then fled the country.
And the story goes on, but I am sure you get the drift by now. I am telling this story to say to the hon President Jacob Zuma that it is time for him as a leader of this country to take a stand on the Zimbabwe crisis. It is time to side with the oppressed people of Zimbabwe against the tyranny and dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, just like the world sided with the people of South Africa against apartheid. It is time to show President Robert Mugabe that he is not Zimbabwe. Mr President, you will be surprised by the number of men and women of goodwill in your own party and elsewhere who will back you on this matter if you take the right route.
I believe that President Mugabe has just one ambition left in life: to die in office as the President of Zimbabwe. By not standing up to him you will be aiding and abetting his plan at the expense of the terrorised people of Zimbabwe. Mr President, Zimbabwe did not wake up one morning to find that it is a failed state. States fail because of a failure of leadership. It is a failure of leadership when the young leader of your ruling party's youth league vows in your presence to kill for you, Mr President, in your personal capacity for political ends and you do not call him to order.
Mr President, when the acting Premier of the Western Cape, the only province that is not governed by the ANC, is heckled and booed in your presence at the marking of one of our national days, and you do not intercede to call to order the unruly people in the crowd, believed to be members of your party, that is a failure of leadership!
Mr President, when a representative of the official opposition, the DA, is mistreated in a similar manner by people wearing the regalia of your governing party, the ANC, on Freedom Day - of all the days on our national calendar! - and you do nothing to reprimand the errant crowd, that is a failure of leadership.
Let me pause a while here because I was personally involved in this disgraceful incident a few weeks ago. I want to commend the Minister of Arts and Culture, Paul Mashatile, for the manner in which he handled the situation. That is what leadership is about.
The DA and other parties represented in our NA were invited to the Freedom Day celebrations at the Union Buildings on 27 April 2011 by the national government. In other words, we were there as guests of the Minister of Arts and Culture and the President of the Republic of South Africa. We were all there, including the representatives of the ANC, to pledge our support and commitment to the government's call on all of us to work together to unite the nation, promote democracy and protect freedom. Unfortunately, those who booed and disrupted my speech and the proceedings were in fact working against all that. They disunited the nation, they derailed democracy and they denied freedom. Mr President, I believe you missed a great opportunity that day to assert your leadership. You addressed the multitude and said nothing about the undemocratic behaviour and the nasty display of intolerance towards a fellow countryman whose only crime was to be a member of the DA.
Mr President, I believe you should have taken the opportunity to tell the nation that South Africa is a multiparty democracy because our founding fathers and mothers, like former Presidents Nelson Mandela, F W de Klerk, like Mama Albertina Sisulu - may her soul rest in peace - and Mrs Helen Suzman - may her soul also rest in peace - went to great lengths to make this possible for all of us.
They did all in their power to establish an inclusive, democratic society that would be the antithesis of the apartheid regime. I believe you should have told that unruly crowd that all political parties in the country - but, more importantly, the ruling ANC - have a huge responsibility to uphold the values of democracy, freedom of choice and nation-building. No leader should remain silent when these values are being breached and trampled.
Mr President, I do not believe that you would like to go down in history as a President of South Africa who saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing and did nothing when a tyrant on our doorstep was destroying Zimbabwe. And some of our countrymen and -women are trampling on our hard-won freedoms and rights in our young and very promising multiparty democracy.
The role you played around the funeral of Ouma Johanna Cecilia du Plessis of Honeydew demonstrates that you are a compassionate person with the capacity to be a good leader. South Africa needs to experience more of such leadership on your part. By the authority vested in your office as the President of all the citizens of the Republic of South Africa, the nation needs to hear you speak up and speak out on the issues I have raised with appropriate leadership. They need to hear you speak! Thank you very much. [Time expired.] [Applause.]