Human Rights Day in South Africa is historically linked with 21 March 1960, and the events of Sharpeville. On that day 69 people died and 180 were wounded when police fired on a peaceful crowd that had gathered in protest against the Pass laws. This day marked an affirmation by ordinary people, rising in unison to proclaim their rights. It became an iconic date in our country’s history that today we commemorate as Human Rights Day as a reminder of our rights and the cost paid for our treasured human rights.
Human rights are rights that everyone should have simply because they are human. In 1948, the United Nations defined 30 articles of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It established universal human rights on the basis of humanity, freedom, justice, and peace.
South Africa has included indivisible human rights in our own Bill of Rights, Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. The articles of our Constitution can only be changed by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, which means it is difficult for anyone, including the government, to take away the basic rights of a citizen.
Yet in the last two years our rights as humans are slowly being stripped away from us without our knowledge or consent. Its time to stand up, united with one voice, to reclaim our freedom and our rights.
# together we are stronger
Fellow South Africans and activists, as the Freedom Alliance leader, I represent over 100 groups across South Africa and abroad. We’re a group of doctors, scientists, legal minds and media specialists along with a team of people motivated to make a difference in the situation we find ourselves in. The times we live in and the global condition calls for unity in numbers so that the voice of the people around the world can be heard. In South Africa and abroad so many have done so much and made immense sacrifices in the short space of time that there’s been an onslaught on our liberties. It is way past midnight, with regards to us reclaiming them back. This group has been created to bring the voices of South African activists together. It is a group that represents the membership of all the leaders of the Freedom Alliance South Africa, a growing group of leaders of South African activist groups that have come together to act as one and initiating new actions, supporting existing actions and implementing strategies that will put the power back in the hands of the people. We’re here to unite the fragmented voices that agree that we face an errant leadership both locally and globally, that is being controlled by global cabal and is steering us towards a system that will control and limit every aspect of our lives through the dictates that they’re already instituting and the propaganda and institutional condition process they are using to achieve mass compliance for the goals behind this agenda, that they are trying to bring to fruition. As a collective the leaders will come together and find practical solutions and strategies that will be implemented so that the errant leaders of our country are forced to rethink their approach and realign with the will of the majority of the citizens whose mandates they no longer have and whose interests are not at the forefront of their actions and their decision making. We will reclaim our constitutional rights and liberties they’ve stripped us of. Together we will make this country we love, a shining example of the “power of the people” to a world that is under attack. In the words of Haile Selassie: “History teaches us that unity is strength and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in a quest for common goals. To strive with all of our cognitive strength for a part to true African brotherhood and unity. Come together South Africa from all corners of our beloved country! It’s time to unite! It’s time to rise! And most of all, it’s time to be free again.
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