@TMFoundation_ claims that Archbishop Emeritus @TutuLegacy should not bear the responsibility of the shortcomings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Is this correct or not? My response is….
1. When you choose to evaluate the TRC, you can take a political/ economic stance or a legal stance. There is a huge difference between these positions which are complimentary at the same time.
2. TM argues that it wasn’t Tutu’s responsibility to address inequality after apartheid but the government. Although he is right at some level he misses a very crucial point: the PURPOSE of the TRC.
3. The purpose of the TRC wasn’t to deliver goods/ services (a government function), but it had to set a parameter for JUSTICE.
4. There are different types of justice: RETRIBUTIVE (punishment); DISTRIBUTIVE (fairness in allocating resources); SOCIAL (fairness in social mobility); RESTORATIVE (rehabilitation)…
5. Government has two tools for servicing the people; politics (who gets what and the basis of allocation) and economics (recognition that resources are scarce: how and quantities).
6. As government leverages on both political and economic tools, it must work within a legal framework. Yes parliaments sets laws to guide, but the #TRC had to come up with the justice framework rather than tears and confessions.
7. Arguably @TutuLegacy turned the TRC into a Sacrament of Penance, which according moral or religious philosophy was necessary BUT material aspects also needed to be considered.
8. The #TRC thus failed to produce a justice framework for either retribution or distribution, which means the fight against apartheid delivered tears and hugs instead of reversing dispossession and or oppression.
9. The work of the state and its institutions ended with a NIL-to-NIL draw after the #TRC, meaning there was no direction whether to take and or punish aggressors in order secure remedies for the victims of apartheid.
10. Without a pronounced justice framework to deal with the end of apartheid, SA was left with two “nations”: one white and rich and another black and extremely poor as well as without appropriate tools of justice connect the two.
11. As a very neoliberal instrument like the Constitution was inserted to supposedly deliver justice while at the same time protecting whatever that had to be taken or distributed.
12. The Constitution also emphasized minority rights (white, rich) and left the majority rights (black, poor) in prayers and in the hands of free markets. Trickle down economics.
13. Amending sect 25, for example, was always going to be complicated. The Bill of Rights was a foregone conclusion that nothing can be changed to protect minority rights.
14. The end result is a situation where minorities (settler communities) ended up in an advantage: law, economy, social and political structures tilt in their favour. BEE had to happen in terms of minority: Once empowered, always empowered!
15. It is in this context that many people lambast or dismiss the #TRC as well as Codesa negotiations as biggest failures in changing the face of the 1910 state and Bantu reserves it created to make one state.
THE END
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