South Africans have what it takes “to overcome the daunting challenges” facing them as a nation if they could only put their resources together to surmount the challenges, an opposition leader said on Monday.
The key to achieving this was for South Africans to “act immediately and harness the power of all who have the best interest of South Africa at heart,” main opposition Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen said in his National Reconciliation Day message to fellow compatriots.
According to Steenhuisen, the scars of the country’s divided past were well on their way to healing.
In reality, however, the country was rather beset by crippling poverty and deep divisions, he noted.
And the symbolic freedom of 1994 should have translated into what he called “real, substantive freedom for millions of South Africans who had been locked out of opportunity and the economy” under apartheid, he said.
“Let us build the reconciled South Africa we once dreamed of,” he added.
Monday marks National Reconciliation Day, with President Cyril Ramaphosa set to address the main event at Bergville in KwaZulu-Natal Province.
NM/jn/APA