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Today we honour a global icon and Father of our Nation, Nelson Mandela. In so doing, we celebrate and continue to draw inspiration from his legacy of peace and reconciliation.

Throughout his years in prison and upon his release, he has remained true to his convictions of seeking to reconcile the nation, build bonds of forgiveness and maintain unity. He was also realistic and understood the challenges which many years of the divisive apartheid system had created in our society. His term as the first democratically president of the country was characterized by spreading and consolidating a message of forgiveness, reconciliation, unity, peace and nation building. In his book “Conversations with Myself’, he acknowledged that “In real life we deal, not with Gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous.”

He thus set out to engage with many with of his old opponents from his prison years, met the wives and widows of Afrikaner leaders and believed in the necessity to conciliate with Afrikaners and the white minority in particular who had very real fears of retribution. He advanced the notion that we could not move forward as a country if we did not forgive. He argued that “Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.”

He was equally steadfast in his view that reconciliation must be accompanied by transformation. At the opening of Parliament in 1996, he said: “We can neither heal nor build with the victims of past injustices forgiving and the beneficiaries merely content in gratitude. Businessmen could not simply continue business as usual, living in islands of privilege: they must think in terms of the rest of the population.”

In South Africa today, the process of social cohesion, nation buildin and reconciliation remains under threat from the very real disparities between the rich and poor, black and white, women and men, rural and urban. These widening gaps between the haves and have-nots continue to undermine our reconciliation efforts and pose a great threat to nation building.

We have seen the issue of race, class and identity play itself out in the media, lately and with frequency, with racial and sexist allegations flying back and forth amongst ordinary South Africans. Clearly, none of these are helpful in assisting us to build social cohesion.
Our “South African-ness” which we celebrate through our Constitution is the glue which contributes to and binds social cohesion and nation building and therefore is an important pillar in our unity in diversity.

The recent Nation Building and Social Cohesion Summit which was initiated by President Zuma in response to the growing level of intolerance amongst the various groups in the country, served as a platform for a national conversation aimed at strengthening social cohesion. Whilst there were some skeptics who poured scorn over the event and sought to dismiss the summit as yet another talk shop, the deliberations and outcomes of the summit are encouraging and heartening and consolidated the commitment to build a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic society. As the ANC we support the summit declaration, which commits all stakeholders led by government to hold more summits at provincial and local level in the coming 12 months, leading to the hosting of the national summit in 2014, coinciding with South Africa's 20-years of freedom. That summit will reflect on progress made going forward from Kliptown 2012.

In the words of our icon, Nelson Mandela: “As we take stock of our accomplishments and shortcomings we should not,by a slightest of chance lose sight of our once ambitious dream for education, total economic The struggle for democracy has never been a matter pursued by one race, class, religious community or gender among South Africans. …The challenge is to foster a nation in which all people irrespective of race, colour, sex, religion or creed, can assert social cohesion fully”.

There can be no greater way to pay homage or to continue with the legacy of our chief architect of peace and reconciliation, Nelson Mandela, than to commit ourselves to the reconciliation project of South Africa.

We urge all South Africans and the world to learn and embrace Madiba's values of compassion, love, kindness and selflessness. These are values that inspire the International Mandela Day, which urges people of the world to make a difference in communities they live.
We wish Madiba a wonderful 94th birthday on this important international day.