Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
When the DA capped its marketing campaign with an election commercial, launched on Sunday, displaying the SA flag within the background, with the opening title “This election is about survival”, the viewers was baffled because the act produced more and more painful, harsh and violent recollections of unfulfilled guarantees and desires of a affluent nation.
With the flag burning within the background, a voiceover says: “The ANC will lose the bulk vote for the primary time in 30 years however will do something to remain in energy.”
In response, President Cyril Ramaphosa, numerous politicians, and extraordinary residents condemned the burning of the flag, saying the DA was being disrespectful and sending a unsuitable message to the world, labelling it treasonous.
The furore over a communication technique initially meant to encourage voters to make deliberate political decisions within the Might 29 nationwide and provincial elections raises grave questions on how our society can, or ought to condemn or censor free speech in concern of political stress.
The nationwide flag might be probably the most emotionally loaded image in South Africa – even when the feelings it stirs are sometimes opposite. We show it in authorities buildings, and our athletes proudly drape it round their shoulders as an indication of our unity in range and overcome the historic challenges we face as a nation.
On the similar time, protesting residents have, on uncommon events, burned it in disgust at our authorities’s corrupt and unaccountable actions. Extra publicly, we reverentially draped the flag on the coffins of nationwide heroes – and its colors proceed for use by artists to sentence the dishonourable acts of many entrusted with our hopes and desires.
Whereas I disagree with the DA’s burning of the flag as an election marketing campaign technique, I consider that the voters should invalidate repeated public makes an attempt by politicians, particularly, to criminalise the act as a result of the symbolic act of burning the flag has grow to be a kind of expression protected by the suitable to freedom of expression within the Structure.
Certainly, a few of the Constitutional Court docket’s most eloquent phrases in defence of free speech train us that “the Structure recognises that folks in our society should be capable of hear, kind and specific opinions freely,” that “freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy,” it’s priceless each for its intrinsic significance and since “it’s instrumentally helpful in defending democracy, by informing residents, encouraging debate and enabling folly and misgovernance to be uncovered”.
As such, we should always ask within the context of those elections for the extent to which the DA’s burning of the flag additionally helps the seek for fact by each people and society typically as a result of if society represses views it considers unacceptable, they might by no means be uncovered as unsuitable as open debate enhances truth-finding and allows us to scrutinise political argument and deliberate social values.
Equally, within the US, the Supreme Court docket dominated that “Freedom to vary is just not restricted to issues that don’t matter a lot. That will be a mere shadow of freedom. The take a look at of its substance is the suitable to vary as to issues that contact the guts of the present order.”
But, right now, the general public response to the DA’s flag burning exhibits that some in our nation help a ban on flag burning. And it’s a vocal half.
The Structure could provide instantaneous authorized protections to politically controversial speech, however it doesn’t typically immediately defend a political celebration or election candidate from the onslaught of public outrage.
And we’ve got seen in different fields how the battle over the hearts and minds of the younger technology has grow to be some of the heated political battles in South Africa – witness the debates over the instructing of racism and land dispossession, over intercourse schooling, over the historical past curriculum usually and so forth.
Fearing condemnation or censorship of their free speech, candidates could provide voters a blended food regimen of election guarantees slightly than face a vituperative backlash. And charging residents with treason could be a novel penalty.
The stress on candidates to censor themselves and their election campaigns – and to remove partaking and provocative communication methods simply because they might contact on politically delicate matters – hurts our democracy and the last word capacity of voters to decide on their elected representatives freely.
An election marketing campaign that feeds voters unquestioning patriotism – or, for that matter, unquestioning something – and squelches any initiative they might take to discover controversial points is just not more likely to produce free-thinking, independent-minded residents.
But as soon as once more, the DA’s critics are taking it too “actually”, studying its advert as an overview of a important coverage when certainly it’s an emotive match thrown into one of many SA’s most divisive political campaigns directed at political arsonists of confirmed capacity.
It really works as a provocation as a result of flag-burning has a heat and distinctive place in democratic SA’s political historical past that the elite in our society has conveniently ignored. It doesn’t function fairly the identical flashpoint elsewhere within the nation, and anyway, when non-South Africans who’re victims of xenophobia and prejudice collect to burn a flag, it’s usually the South African one they burn. There’s simply one thing very flammable about that flag.
After all, it’s simpler to burn our flag wherever you occur to be as a result of for those who burn your nationwide flag in a variety of nations, together with Algeria, France, Portugal and Switzerland, you possibly can face a hefty jail sentence. Denmark, then again, permits the burning of its flag however bans assaults on overseas flags for concern of beginning a warfare.
These nations will not be as blessed as we’re by a Structure that has enshrined freedom of speech since 1994.
Burning the flag has grow to be a robust image of that free speech – and the historical past of this iconoclastic act ought to warn these threatening treason fees and retribution that they won’t get a free trip to trample rights.
The truth that many South Africans maintain it as a self-evident fact and that residents can burn flags reveals how strongly resistance to energy lives in SA’s historical past.
This furore has uncovered to voters these politicians in authorities who threaten a political celebration or candidate due to a fetish over a bit of material however seem to haven’t any drawback trampling all around the very precept of freedom the flag is meant to symbolise.
* Nyembezi is a human rights activist, researcher and coverage analyst
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