Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi has warned that calls to reinstate the death penalty would drag South Africa back towards the brutality of its apartheid past, saying capital punishment has no place in a constitutional democracy founded on human dignity and the right to life.

“Those who today call for the return of death penalty must understand that they are asking for our country to return to barbarism. Capital punishment has no place in a humane constitutional democracy,” Kubayi said. “Let us be vigilant and fight for a system that values the right to life.”

Kubayi made the remarks during the Gallows Lecture on Saturday, held to commemorate political prisoners executed by the apartheid state and to reflect on the abolition of capital punishment three decades after South Africa’s constitutional transition.

Weapon to crush resistance

She said the death penalty had not merely been used to punish crime, but had served as a weapon through which the apartheid government attempted to crush political resistance and preserve white minority rule.

“The death sentence was being used as a deterrent for those who wanted to participate in the struggle for freedom,” she said.

Kubayi said many political prisoners were sentenced to death during the late 1980s, with some executed in secret. She said testimony presented during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission showed that 95% of those sentenced to death under apartheid were black, while the people imposing the sentences were white.

The Constitutional Court outlawed the death penalty in June 1995 in its judgment in the case of State v Makwanyane and Mchunu.

Kubayi described the ruling as a decisive break with an inhumane system.

“In handing down that judgement lives were saved, a new chapter in South African Jurisprudence was opened, a victory for the liberation struggle was secured and a major milestone in the journey towards the birth of new humane and civilised society was marked,” she said.

“That momentous court decision marked the end of a system that killed good people and at the same time played midwife to the birth of a new system that saved.”

Kubayi said the apartheid state had retained ownership of the bodies of political prisoners it executed, denying their families the opportunity to bury and mourn them.

Gallows Exhumation Project

She said the government’s Gallows Exhumation Project had recovered the remains of 81 people who were executed for politically related offences and returned them to their families. The project was concluded last year, she said.

But Kubayi said honouring those who died required more than rejecting the death penalty. It also demanded action against the poverty, unemployment and inequality that continued to deny millions of South Africans the rights promised by the Constitution.

“We live in South Africa that suffers from the triple challenges of inequality, poverty and unemployment,” she said.

“We have to do everything in our power to ensure that we accelerate socioeconomic development so that we can create jobs and economic opportunities for the majority of our people especially the youth and women.”

Kubayi said that abandoning efforts to improve people’s lives would betray those who died fighting for freedom.

“The failure and retreat from striving to build a better life for will be a betrayal of those who paid the ultimate price to secure freedom and dignity for their fellow countrymen and women,” she said.

“By failing to create a better life for all, we will be perpetuating a system that kills by other means.”

She said South Africa’s Bill of Rights deliberately placed socioeconomic rights, including access to housing, healthcare, food, water and education, alongside civil and political freedoms.

Kubayi called on South Africans to defend the constitutional order and recommit themselves to building the free and prosperous country envisioned by those who resisted apartheid.

“Let us join hands and work together to honour the memory of the fallen heroes and heroines who dreamed of a free and prosperous South Africa by recommitting our selves to the goals of our liberation struggle,” she said.

INSIDE POLITICS

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