How does one describe New York.  Each i would assume would have a different take on the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, the concrete jungle were dreams are made of. Here is my take on this big beautiful city. It is over populated (as it would be, it’s New York), tall buildings, dirty and yet it has an allure to it. On our first arrival we assumed the bus was wrong so was Claire and every one who had been there before because where we were dropped of was nothing like Gossip Girl or Brown sugar or any other movie that was made in New York. As we soon made our way to the Subway with luggage in hand ( you can only trust a girl to bring 2weeks worth of clothing for just a weekend) we made our way to our residence. Having already been told that the evenings would be packed with formal events we soon made our way to our first one at the SA Consulate General offices.  There we were greeted with the smooth music of Hugh Masikela and South African traditional cuisine even iwisa made an appearance. Soon we started our meet and greet with the guests, some were South African and worked in the office of the Consulate and some were deployed in the UN security council and others were under the employment of Standard Bank and various other corporations.

 It was an amazing opportunity to be amongst such greatness in one evening and yet it bothered me the most that we had to come all the way to the US to get to speak with people in the offices of importance in our own countries and that only 15 students would be amongst the lucky ones to hear about the on going struggles that is faced by the SA UN Security Council  members, hearing of the great job that the consulate was doing in New York to bring awareness about our own country. I still find it truly sad that we had gotten such opportunity that some will never receive and some times it may not even be their lack of enthusiasm with regards to the issues affecting them directly and indirectly but rather the unavailability of the opportunity to availing itself to the people that may also want to hear about it the most.

We have now been in the USA for 2 weeks. We have barely had time to sleep and so many exciting things have happened that it would be hard to even list them all.

 

Our SAWIP theme for week 2 was Democracy. This topic was particularly interesting to me as a law student. My recent research project was presented on voting rights for non-citizens and looked closely at the interaction between voting rights and democracy. At our Idasa panel on Monday night, experts in the field, Eric Robinson (National Endowment for Democracy), Jon Elliot (Human Rights Watch) and Dr. Chloe Schwenke (Africa Bureau of USAID) provided some insight into the concept of democracy. Perhaps the quote of the night was “Democracy is like love- it’s hard to define, but you know when you’ve found it”.

 

Democracy is a fluid concept especially with the rise in International migration and globalization. The rights and obligations that come with citizenship are no longer as clearly defined as they were in the past. This means that democracy no longer means the practice of resident citizens voting for their local and national government. It must encourage the participation of others, especially non citizen residents. This concept is in line with the idea of street democracy which allows for those who are part of the community, who pay taxes, who send their children to local schools, to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. This definition of democracy means that citizenship and voting rights are not the only facets of democracy. We must consider a complete package of rights and obligations including freedom of speech, ease of government transition, distribution of power and the quality of public debate.

 

We spent the weekend in New York meeting with the South African UN delegates, visiting the New York Stock Exchange and touring the city. My highlight was the visit to the UN where the poor tour guide was overwhelmed with questions about the lack of a female Secretary General, the lack of representation for Africa in a permanent seat on the Security Council and the ANC’s non-voting seat in the General Assembly in the 1980’s. Interestingly, Ban Ki-Moon was sworn in for a second term as Secretary General just last week (on June 21) so perhaps he will be able to change the Security Council composition.