REACTION ON COMMENTS BY MINISTER BLADE NZIMANDE REGARDING THE FOUNDATION
The FW de Klerk Foundation has taken note of Minister Blade Nzimande's recent comments regarding the Foundation and other organizations that are seeking to uphold the constitutional rights of South African citizens. The Minister refers to us as a "liberal conservative" organization. He presumably regards both liberalism and conservatism as negative terms, but he is quite right.
We are a liberal organization in the sense that we unambiguously support all the individual rights and values set out in the Constitution. We unashamedly believe in individual freedom; in free markets; the freedom of expression and in a free and independent judiciary. We also support communal rights that have their roots in all the rich traditions and cultures of our diverse society.
In addition, we prefer pragmatic approaches based on the experience and accumulated wisdom of our and other societies, rather than the ideological ‘human engineering' approaches favoured by others. In this sense we are also a conservative organization. The Minister also refers to us as "an all-white organization". This is not true. Our Board includes respected members from all our communities.
We have a completely non-racial approach to the appointment of staff members and require only that they should all support the Constitution. Although we find it distasteful to label our employees in racial terms, we have employed black and coloured staff and a majority of the interns have been of black or Asian origin.
One of our senior black employees left us to spend more time with her family and another left us to become a researcher to a constitutional court judge. We could have appointed excellent black candidates to key posts, but unfortunately did not have the financial resources to pay the market-related salaries that they asked for.
Our objectives are completely non-racial. We are deeply concerned about the defence and promotion of the rights of all South Africans. We recently sought, and obtained, redress from the Human Rights Commission for a black South African whose rights had been violated by the South African Police. We are currently assisting a group of predominantly Coloured South Africans whose rights are being seriously threatened by the government. We entered the Nyathi case as amicus curiae to ensure that the state responds satisfactorily to court orders that related primarily to government payments to black citizens.
We have also supported the rights of San and Koi communities and have provided them with advice. However, most of our activities have centered on issues that affect the rights of all South Africans. We support the independence of the judiciary and the integrity of the process by which judges are appointed. It is for this reason that we are currently involved as amicus curiae in the case of the Cape Bar Council v. the Judicial Services Commission. We have strongly opposed moves to dilute the independence of the National Prosecuting Authority and the abolition of the "Scorpions".
We also forthrightly oppose the Protection of Information Bill because we believe that it still poses a serious threat to freedom of expression and the right to access government information. We opposed the Expropriation Bill in 2008, not because we objected to expropriation in principle, but because the bill attempted to exclude the role of our courts in determining fair compensation. In many of these activities we have , of necessity, found ourselves in opposition to the government
of the day. However, we have no party political affiliation and will criticize or support parties and organizations according to the degree that their policies and actions are in compliance with the constitution. In our public communication, we go out of our way to give credit to government for the many positive and constructive initiatives that it has taken - as we did in our conference this year on "The Things that Unite Us." However, we shall not hesitate to expose and criticize any action or policy of any party that we believe is incompatible with the Constitution.
As a civil society organization in a free and democratic society we have the fullest right to involve ourselves in issues of public concern. More than this, we believe that that we have a special duty to do so. When he was President, F W de Klerk called on his constituency to support the negotiation process and to put their faith in a justiciable non-racial constitution that would be fair to all South Africans. Although he has retired from active politics, Mr De Klerk believes that he has a continuing duty to do everything that he can to uphold that constitution not only for his own supporters, but for all South Africans.
Issued by the FW de Klerk Foundation, September 13 2011 (amended September 14)
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