By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
File Photo.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has used his Human Right’s Day address to ensure South Africans of his mission to establish a better country especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ramaphosa said this was being done through building a new economy that would ensure equal opportunities for all citizens.
This new economy, he said, would also ensure that basic human rights, as enshrined in the constitution, are upheld. These include, among other things, the right to jobs, dignity, freedom of association, safety and education.
These would be made possible, Ramaphosa said, by the government’s economic reconstruction and recovery plan that was introduced after the destruction of the country’s economy by the pandemic.
He said the government’s plan was not about saving their own jobs but was meant to preserve the “humanity” of South Africans who lost so much at the height of the pandemic.
Many people lost their jobs and had their livelihoods turned upside down due to the Covid-19 pandemic imposed lockdown.
Many of South Africans’ rights were limited under the state of disaster as the government tried to contain the spread of the virus, which saw people unable to make a living.
“In doing so, let us remember that this is a struggle for all of us far greater than ourselves,” Ramaphosa said on rebuilding the economy.
“It is not a fight for our own piece of bread, for our own jobs to be saved, or for our own health and safety. It is a fight to preserve our common humanity.”
Ramaphosa said they were trying to build a new economy that will present equal opportunities for all.
He said through the new economy they were trying to rebuild an SA that was way better than the one before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The government, together with working labour, business and communities must work together to achieve this goal.
This year’s commemoration also coincided with the 25th anniversary of the enactment of the Constitution of the Republic into law.
Ramaphosa said that Human rights that were hard-won by the heroes and heroines of Sharpeville and the countless heroes and heroines of our struggle for liberation broadly.
They were firm in their conviction that freedom for some is freedom for none; and that nobody must be left behind, he said.
It was at Sharpeville that President Nelson Mandela signed our democratic Constitution into law 25 years ago.
The Constitution is a shade and a shelter for all.
Read the full Statement here: Cyril Ramaphosa Human Rights Day Speech.