This year the staff of the FW de Klerk Foundation and its Centre for Constitutional Rights (CFCR) again join the rest of the world in celebrating the life and legacy of former President Nelson Mandela.  

The Foundation shares Madiba’s vision to spread social justice and freedom for all, and welcomes the opportunity be part of a Mandela Day – now in its 10th year. 

Echoing the new Mandela Day strategy’s primary focus on collaborative partnerships, the FW de Klerk Foundation partners with several worthy organisations through its long-running Support for Charities Programme. These organisations include Autism Western Cape, Friends of Vista Nova, Innovation for the Blind, Iris House Children’s Hospice, the National Institute for the Deaf (NID), Salesian Life Choices and the Woodside Special Care Centre. All are committed to making a daily difference in the lives of persons with disabilities, and underprivileged youth. Thanks to the generosity of its funding partners, the Nedbank South African Charity Golf Day and the Maurice Hatter Foundation, the FW de Klerk Foundation is able to contribute to positive change in the lives of hundreds of South Africans.

The FW de Klerk Foundation has often expressed the view that the choice confronting the ANC – and accordingly South Africa – is between the racial ideology of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) on the one hand, and the much more pragmatic approach of the National Development Plan (NDP), on the other.  For us the most significant elements in President Ramaphosa’s SONA speech last night were:

• a strong reaffirmation of the NDP and a new determination to place it “at the centre of our national effort, to make it alive, to make it part of the lived experience of the South African people”;
• an unambiguous reaffirmation of South African Reserve Banks’ constitutional role to protect the value of the rand in the interest of balanced and sustainable growth; and
• a brief reference to the core question of land reform with a renewed commitment to “accelerated land reform in rural and urban areas” and significantly “a clear property rights regime” – as well as an announcement that the Cabinet would soon consider the report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture.