More than twenty young politicians from 10 African countries gathered for three days at the Berjaya Beau Vallon Beach Resort from August 11 to 13th to discuss the Principles of a Free Society. The youngsters represented centre and centre right parties in their respective countries. The conference was sponsored by the Jarl Hjarmarson Foundation of
The DP is honoured and privileged to have had the opportunity to be the host of this conference and I extend a warm welcome to all the young people from our sister parties from the continent who share the common values associated with centre and centre right policies.
The theme of your conference is about Freedom. Freedom is something most of us take for granted until we lose it. For most of you, having come from the various societies that you do, may not yourselves have experienced the loss of your freedom. By that I do not mean having restrictions put on you personally, but rather the wider fundamental rights expressed in the UN charter. By losing your freedom I mean, 1) the freedom to associate with others and form political parties or other groupings; 2) the freedom of expression without fear; and 3) the freedom of movement inside your country. These fundamental rights in my view define the core values of any human being; take away those rights and you turn the individual into a slave.
I have had the “good fortune”, to have grown up and spent the years of my youth enjoying those very freedoms, which I took for granted, until at the tender age of 26, one night I lost them. Our country went through a trauma from that day onwards with the imposition of arbitrary rule by the barrel of a gun for the next fifteen years. During that time fundamental rights and freedoms were suppressed and then promised to us as mere aspirations. The new ideology, we were told, would liberate us form the yoke of capitalism in order for us to enjoy real freedoms.
I am fortunate, if these are indeed appropriate word to describe what I have to tell you, in having experienced being arbitrarily arrested and thrown into prison without charge of trial; without the legal right of even a hearing by a court of law, nor even the privilege, to be visited by a next of kin. I spent a total of nine-months under this prison regime.
I also have had the unfortunate experience of being banished into exile in a foreign land, as well as the experience of returning home, free once again to be among my compatriots, friends and families. That privilege also extended to my being at the forefront of new political battles to reinstate fundamental human rights as our core values, of which I am proud of my achievements.
Most of you, who are gathered here today, are the children or may even be the grand children of a generation that saw or experienced the disappearance of fundamental freedoms from their society. Some of your parents or even some of you may have experienced the carnage of a society devoid of tolerance, where the rule of law was replaced by the rule of men. I wish and somehow I am confident that at least in your lifetime you would be able to enjoy the fruits of the struggle of your parents or grand parents, against the dark clouds of tyranny. By their actions your parents have planted the seeds of freedoms. By your presence today at this conference, you are watering the roots to bring forth a society of respect for fundamental rights and freedoms, tolerance and the rule of law.
Finally, if I may be permitted, I would like to throw in some food for thoughts for you to consider during your deliberations. This comes from the writings of the famous Ayne Rand. Many of you may not be familiar with this author but if you get the chance please read her book Atlas Shrugged. At this point, I think the following thoughts of this famous author are worth noting. In her defence of property rights she made the following perceptive remark: in a society where there is the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights, the citizen is free to do anything except what the law forbids; whereas the government can only do what the law allows it to do. This is a concept, that some of the current political leaders of our respective countries find very hard to understand and for obvious reasons.
Permit me also to leave you with another food for thought. One of the most important fruits of the fundamental freedoms that I mentioned earlier, in my view is private property. Hence, if you have freedom but lose the right to own property you are virtually a slave. Equally, if you have the right to property but do not have the freedom to enjoy the fruits of property ownership you are still a slave. This concept is not an abstract. Our Seychellois society actually experienced it twice.
The first time some two hundred years ago when two hundred or so African slaves were saved from their Arab captors and freed by the British Navy and brought to
The second experience was the imposition of the one-party Marxist state that followed the coup d’etat of 1977. Under this ideology, we were allowed to continue to own property but we were deprived of those fundamental freedoms necessary for us to enjoy the fruits of property ownership.
In these two experiences, we were virtual slaves. Interestingly enough, in the first instance as fundamental rights became universal and entrenched, free enterprise developed too and became the lake that nurtured the fruits of property ownership. In the second instance, free enterprise was gradually snuffed out; to use a metaphor, the lake was gradually drained of the water that nurtures the fruits of private property. As a result the economy stagnated and started to decline.