Building a non-racial community

Wayne Boonzaaier
02 August 2016

The South African Constitution states that everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.

The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more ground. Including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital stratus, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, beliefs, cultures, language and birth.

This is what political parties had to say on creating a non-racial community.

DA: “Building a non-racial society starts with making sure that you create an opportunity where all can really live out their lives in freedom and fairness.

That means you must have a governance that is clean where opportunity is created.

Our ratings as the city are much higher than that of the national government because we’ve ensured that there’s clean governance.

We’ve ensured that funding and investments flow into the city . So that opportunity can be created for all of its citizens, without exclusion.”

LPP: “We are dealing with the topic of building non-racial and social integrated communities.

But we need to look at what we need in order for us to build a sustainable community.

One thing we don’t have in Cape Town is access to economics. The second thing we don’t have is to participate within the policy and the planning of a sustainable infrastructure.

Now it’s a fact that most of our communities are built on racial divides, it’s a fact that most of the housing problems in the city are built on racial divides.

You have to be from Cape Town to understand that the disparity is so vivid you can’t but say we live on racial divides.

It’s a fact that those with the highest rates of unemployment and the highest social decay are racially isolated with limited access to economic opportunities. We want to change that”

COPE: “We believe that over the last 22 years there was a missed opportunity. Nelson Mandela set us on the road of trying to integrate us as a society and to defeat apartheid.

Unfortunately the legacy of apartheid continues and apartheid geography is what we have to tackle seriously.

We need to create densification in the city. We need people to be brought from the outer city into the inner city for the face of Cape Town to change.

By integrating, by creating new opportunities for black, white, brown to live together in one space.

We also want to introduce the twining of wards, a rich ward twins with one poor ward.

In this way we will allow ordinary people to do something to try and go beyond the racial divide. To try and earn social capital by those who can assist those who are suffering and in that way you are building.”