Afrigather That is former finance minister Trevor Manuel’s keynote tackle at The Gathering: Twenty Twenty-4.
I want to provoke a dialogue about the place we’re on the journey to remaking the interactions between ourselves and the transformation of society.
So let me begin with a “nostra culpa”. My technology stands accused of strolling away from an incomplete transition.
Maybe we thought of that the adoption of the Structure was an end-point, not totally realising that guidelines wanted to be scribed and establishments constructed. Or maybe it was simply that the battle had been too lengthy and arduous, and that we might resolve the unfinished enterprise within the fullness of time. Or maybe it was that in our youthful enthusiasm, our political schooling was centered on the “withering of the state”, leaving too few texts on statecraft.
Regardless of the cause, we should always have an trustworthy dialogue concerning the points that stay undone. My competition is that it’ll by no means be too late for that dialogue. Curiously, once we have been assigned the duty of convening a Nationwide Planning Fee, we noticed it as a chance, to re-energise a dialogue about constitutional values, some 14 years after the Structure was first adopted.
Once we adopted the Structure we have been more than happy that the Preamble describes us as “freely…
