Im shaun ley. In december, south africas ruling party the anc chooses a successor for president jacob zuma. Corruption allegations denied by the president continued to swirl, but he has survived them all. Albie sachs is another survivor, but one of a different kind. He survived imprisonment, exile, and being blown up by the countrys security forces, and he helped write the posta pa rtheid constitution. He thinks it is one of the worlds best so why do others, especially the young, say that the constitution is against us, especially if youre poor . Albie sachs, welcome to hardtalk. You defended black South Africans under apartheid laws. You were imprisoned under those laws yourself. You then helped write the most fundamental law of all, the constitution for postapartheid south africa, and then sat on the Constitutional Court to enforce that constitution. Is there enough respect, do you think, for the law in south africa today . It is so fascinating to watch, because the law is playing a central role in our country. The more disrespect there is for it, the more respect there is for the way its responding. I have been off the Constitutional Court now for six or seven years, so im not bragging about myself, its my colleagues, another generation. I think theyre doing extraordinary work. 0ne weapon is the constitution, but that is notjust a document, a set of words. It grew out of our history. It grew out of our pain. It grew out of our eagerness to find a way, how can we live together in one country, when we are trying to kill each other . It grew out of our drawing on the best the world had to offer in terms of governance, the rights of people. It is a very progressive constitution in its terms and we have strong institutions to back it up. And one of the reflections that has come to me recently is that you need three things, and if any one of them missing you are in danger. You need a good constitution. I dont know how you guys in england have managed a couple of hundred years without one. You have managed. But you need a good constitution. You need constitutionalism. That is something in the culture of the society, notjust a document, a sense of right and wrong, fair, unfair ways of doing things, and you need institutions that can be invoked, that work. And what has been so striking in south africa now, for all the allegations, the evidence, the leaks that have come out, the very powerful condemnations of very high figures in our society, the institutions have remained firm. One of them, the Public Protector, created in a chapter in the constitution, chapter nine, institutions for the protections of democracy. That includes the Public Protector, like the ombudsman, but much more powerful. It includes the independent electoral commission. Kenya, now, is struggling so hard, partly because there is a lack of faith in their electoral commission. We had elections last year without a single complaint. It includes the Constitutional Court, the auditor general. A whole series of bodies protected by the constitution. Lets pick up on one of those, the Public Protector. The previous Public Protector had drawn up a report, you will be aware of this, over the state of capture, she called it, in the relationship between the president and the gupta family. She urged the president to decide who chaired the enquiry. Another institution established by the constitution said, under section 84, this power can only be exercised by the president. Whereupon the new Public Protector says, no, no, there are numerous reasons to believe the president is subject to a conflict of interest here, so he cannot possibly appoint the chairman of this particular committee of a commission of enquiry because he would have a direct personal and financial interest in the outcome. Two institutions, one constitution. You are on the Constitutional Court, you helped write the constitution. Who is right . It is not for me to answer. The very issue now is being debated in the Constitutional Court, and on one hand, the constitution says the power to create commissions of enquiry belongs to the president. 0n the other hand, the recommendations of the Public Protector can be put into force, and she says, in this particular case, you would appoint the commission of enquiry. We are not going to say that, but you wouldnt choose the judge to have that. The chiefjustice will choose. And then you will have two. It is the kind of question you put to final year law students for them to grapple with. And it will be making law. So it is not for me to pronounce on it. And you would argue there is no right answer on that, but between them, the institutions have to resolve this . I wouldnt say there is no right answer. I think there is a correct answer. I wont say what i think it is. My colleagues, or those who would be my colleagues if i were still on the bench, they will decide that. What i can be sure of is that they will give a soundly reasoned answer. I am pretty confident that whatever the answer is, it will be accepted. And that is the key thing, isnt it . Whether it goes in his favour or against him, it will be accepted. Do you think the Public Protectors powers need to be strengthened, now, watching this in operation over the past few years, in a highly political environment . It cant get more political than investigating the president. I think what the Public Protector needs is not so much more power, the power is there in the constitution, but more resources. Why do you think there have been a growing number of attacks on the constitution . It does seem to have become more contested in the last couple of years than in the first decade, decade and a half of postapartheid south africa. The challenges are coming from two, well, i dont even have the extra arm to show how far apart they are. Just imagine this arm. Indeed, as it once was as it was. 0n the one hand, the challenge, the judges are overreaching themselves. That comes from supporters of the president today. 0n the other hand, it comes from young people saying that this constitution is standing in the way of real transformation of land redistribution in the country. It is blocking the way. And you heard this first hand, didnt you . When you delivered that lecture back in the university of western cape and some of the audience said to you, every generation has its mission, yours was political liberation, ours is economic liberation. And it is fantastic to hear that challenge. I have spent a lot of time involved now and what is pompously called intergenerational discourse, and its terrific. Those young people, they like to see that i have got some spirit and some stories to tell, and i like the passion, the eagerness, the idealism, the exquisite and beautiful use of language. The country can only benefit when people are thinking, even if the thought is sometimes as cheeky and irreverent as my thought was at that age. It stirs up the country. There is a harsh edge to this. It is the economic reality in which many South Africans are living. Many of those young people you are speaking to, their families, that is what they have grown up with. Whatever the promise of a multiracial south africa in which black South Africans and coloured South Africans took their place as equal citizens with white South Africans, the economic reality is an Unemployment Rate of 54 for young people and an overall Unemployment Rate of 27 for everybody. Far too high. Intense, entrenched poverty. A sense that, really, south africa is not the south africa they were promised. Jonathan jansen says that when speaking to students, if the late Nelson Mandela gets any mention at all, its as a sellout. The man who led south africa into a soft transition which left White Privilege undisturbed and black poverty undiminished. He is right, isnt he . Hes wrong. Hes wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Hes not wrong to say that thats what people are saying, but what they are saying misses almost completely the reality of what was achieved. We had to destroy the system of apartheid to open the way to economic transformation. But it hasnt happened. If we tried everything at once we would have had chaos, disaster, collapse. People would have said, black majority rule just leads to chaos. So we dismantled the institutions of apartheid, we integrated the army, and we gave power to parliament to bring about transformation. If parliament has not done enough, that is a very valid question, but dont blame mandela, dont blame the constitution. I am not a lawyers lawyers lawyer, who believes in the law as such. But we got so much into that constitution, and you read it, the text, the language is for transformation, for change. The argument that im advancing, in many ways, is to use the constitution. Dont trample on it. It is your biggest weapon to bring about a second liberation which will be the economic liberation. On that second liberation, do you back the argument there should be an amendment to the constitution . This has been advanced byjulius malema of the Economic Freedom fighters, which would actually allow the state to appropriate land without compensation. His argument is simple. We are told in our oath that we own the land, but we dont own the land. The distribution of land, Land Ownership, it is still really concentrated in a small number of hands, just as it was before apartheid was abolished. Hes absolutely right that the patterns of Land Ownership have changed very slightly. It is not as though nothing has been done. Something like 80,000 people who were dispossessed under apartheid got their land back or got money back. And programmes for land reform remain to be implemented. So that aspect is completely correct. It is possible to confiscate land, expropriated land, at values well below market value, if you apply the constitution. Section 25 . Yes, section 25, if it is lying fallow when people need housing, it can be used. That could be taken into account. If the land was bought for a song, if the government has invested a lot into loans to the farmers, all of that can be taken into account. None of that has really been tried, so try that first. The problem with doing it without compensation is that there is no discipline at all. You can have state bureaucrats seizing the land, dishing it out to theirfriends. We dont want that. You are worried about the precedent set by zimbabwe . I dont want to mention particular countries, but it is not restricted to one country. It has happened in many countries, where people who fought bravely forfreedom got freedom, but then used their position in the state to accumulate enormous tracts of land for themselves and their families. Those allegations have been made at some in south africa as well, but we will leave that for now. Who owns the land, who had a stake in the nation, that was an important part of the campaign. We used to say, africa come back. In that sense, it has come back, in a kind of moral sense, a leadership sense, the people are calling the shots politically. Africa, and overwhelmingly black africans, we hear the different languages being used in parliament, in this debate, but we have not got africa back in the sense of direct connection with means of production, with the soil, with the way people live. That has to be done, it is a very valid claim that is being made. During that long struggle the first part of that struggle, because from the sound of that you think some of these struggles continue you spend months in solitary confinement. Do you think you still bear the scars of that ordeal, inside . I do. You never get over solitary confinement. It leaves a residue, a repository of deep, deep sadness. Ironically, i cant explain it, when i was blown up, and i survived, it blew away that misery. So that was almost a catharsis of what had gone before . It was like saying, 0k, they tried to kill you. And i survived. I survived, you know . People say the definition of an optimist is that the glass is half full. I was optimistic. They only blew off my arm. I survived. That was 1988 and i still feel that today. The period of solitary confinement was in the 1960s, and you spend how long. It was 168 days the first time, and about three months the second time, with some sleep deprivation thrown in. And you talk about the terrible moment when you realised that they had actually beaten your body not physically beaten you, but had kind of put you under such strain and stress that you started to talk. And you didnt talk about people who they could get. You talked about people who had gone abroad, or were past. Did you fear that, if that process had continued much longer, you would have been so broken that you would have . I dont know. It is possible. I got through the first session completely. I didnt say a word, 168 days. The second time, it was a much rougher treatment, and sleep deprivation, i think something in my food. I collapsed on the ground, they poured water on me, kept my eyes open. And my choice was, try and control my breakdown, because others had withstood it for three, four, five days collapsed completely. And then, fortunately, the way these things happen, somebody. Another person who had undergone this, in another cell, put in an application to court. I heard about it. I smuggled out a tiny little note about my own experience, and the court actually, at that stage, put a stop to the interrogation. So who knows . I might not the sitting here today if it hadnt been for that court application. You talked to them about comrades who were dead, people you thought they couldnt get at, to give them something. At the stage i was doing that, they were preparing to come back and get me afterwards. I started off by saying, im making this statement under duress, and so on. Theyjust elided it all from the actual document that they had. But afterwards, i discovered i had complained to a magistrate. It is there on you know, we used to have these flimsies pink and green carbon copies. And there it is, if anybody wants to. Faint, but still preserved for all eternity. That i actually complained at the time. You mentioned a couple of times already the subsequent act, the attempt to murder you by south African Security services. What do you recall of that day . It has shaped me. And its not only shaped me physically, it shaped my thinking. Because, when i got a letter, im recovering in a London Hospital dont worry comrade, we will avenge you. Avenge me . We are going to cut off their arms, blind them in one eye . Is that what you want . If we get freedom, we get democracy, we get justice, that will be my soft vengeance. Roses and lilies will grow out of my arm. And, since 1988, soft vengeance has been my theme. And getting the constitution, helping to write a constitution, sitting on a court that is upholding the constitution, its all part of my soft vengeance. And soft vengeance is much more powerful than hard vengeance. Hard vengeance is, we are stronger, we are doing to them what they did to us. Soft vengeance is the triumph of the ideals. All the pain you went through, all that period of recovery and convalescence, all, i guess, the fear that at some point you may not have made it you didnt feel any anger . 0n the contrary, i feltjoy. That i had survived, and it is for something. It validates all the pain, the hardship, the misery, the doubts. Yes, we are getting democracy in the country. Yes, we have a court that will stand up to the president , to parliament, to wherever, if necessary, in terms of the constitution. And yet you say that, when you took your very young son 0liver to the scene, planning to tell him exactly what had happened to his papa, you couldnt quite bring yourself to tell him the full evil of the system that you had been fighting. I couldnt tell him about the bomb, the event. Something inside mejust blocked me. I didnt want to tell him that his mum and his dad would have been breaking the lawjust by kissing each other, let alone conceiving him. I didnt want him to hear that from me. Because his mum was black, and you were white. She is black, or would have been classified as black. I would have been classified as white. I didnt want him to carry that burden from his dad. He will learn about in history, from others. He is already learning about it. And for you, that is still the most revolting thing about the system the inhumanity of that, as much as the violence, as much as the terrible things like, for example, the agents who tried to kill you. Yes, it is the inhumanity of the conception that some people are worth more than other people. This is foundational, and it is that denial of basic human dignity. And that has been a huge achievement in south africa. There is so much that is wrong now. It is not only corruption. It is unemployment, there is violence, racism in our society is still very, very strong. But weve got a country. We didnt have a country before south africa. Weve got a constitution, weve got institutions, and weve got people who speak their minds. As stalin put it, leaders come and go, but the people never die. Its a very romantic notion, but i think its a notion Worth Holding on to, that people never die. I wonder if theres a bit of romance that perhaps has got in the way the transition for south africa, and added that perfectly understandable sense of camaraderie, that sense of loyalty to comrades who fought in the struggle for so long, and the ideal of the African National congress to the principle, and the belief that you all swore to. Do you think perhaps some people have held onto that too long, and perhaps been too willing to put, in a crude way, party before country . No. The values you can never hold on too long. Never, never, never. And the value has always had that critical self reflection element to it. 0liver lukutandu, who im speaking about a lot now, he was so open minded, so willing to embrace new ways of looking at things. But those core values of non racism never change. That shouldnt change. The loyalty is to the values. You cannot have failed to see that, in a succession of votes of no confidence against president zuma, for all the allegations against him, the anc mps loyally trooped through the lobby supporting the president. And in the first ballot which was held with a secret ballot, the most recent, suddenly perhaps 25, maybe as many as 30 anc mps vote against him. That is a revelation, isnt it, that actually this is a corrosive thing, this loyalty to party . Only when they are protected by the secret ballot do they vote with their conscience. Its even more complicated than that, because the story was, many more would have voted in favour, except they felt it wasnt for parliament to change the president of the anc. The anc is having a conference in december. The anc has to do it itself. Thats fine, but if youre one of the people on the end of all that, the ordinary people of south africa, you could say, we can have this debate and talk about it, but nothing changes. And we hear, for example, all these allegations. The Public Prosecutor finds hes 44 million, i think, have been spent on sorting out his property for security. He is told to pay some of it back, and says im not going to pay it back. Nothing changes, nothing happens. No, no, no. He was ordered to pay some of it back, and he paid it back. 0nly because the court intervened. Yes, the court intervened, and his own counsel said we acknowledge he has to pay it back. Thats not insignificant. In fact, i would say its hugely significant. Would it be better for the country if there was a change of president sooner than 2019 . Im not going to get drawn into that, simply because i dont think its right, as a formerjudge. Its a question i would love to offer my opinions on, but. We would love you to do so. I require it is a kind ofjudicial prudence. I wont answer. Are you disappointed with south africa as it is today . Is it that sense of the curates egg good in parts . I think no, no, im much more affirmative than that. Its partly. I lived in mozambique after independence. It was fantastic. We were so excited, we were lifted up by this revolution, and it crashed. Bitter civil war, just chaotic. Are you saying at least south africa isnt as bad as that . We havent had that, it hasnt happened. And elections are meaningful. We had a higher percentage polled for our municipal elections last year than in america had for their president , and there wasnt a single complaint afterwards. Let me ask you a question, and it has nothing to do with individuals. Yes. Whoever she or he is who takes office after the summer of 2019, what should south africas next president aim to do differently than the previous three president s . I would hope, whoever becomes president of the anc who isnt automatically the future president of south africa, because people have a vote in general elections after that. They do, but it has always been the anc. Well, giving strong emphasis on restoring integrity of institutions, restoring the values of non racism, in creating conditions for serious and deep going economic transformation. But getting advice from as many sources as possible, and with a Strong Initiative in that regard. And maybe cutting down on some of the the bitterness, the sharpness, the toxic elements of our debate, however it might be. And maybe cutting down on some of the the bitterness, the sharpness, the toxic elements of our debate, however it might be. Albie sachs, formerjustice of the Constitutional Court, campaignerfor the end of apartheid, thank you so much for being with us on hardtalk. Thank you. Friday is looking beautiful and sunny across most of the uk, how about that . Thats the forecast. The morning maybe cloudy and misty across the south of the uk but by the time we get to the second half of the morning and lunchtime, it will be a case of a beautiful autumn day across the country. A a lot of cloud and drizzle early on but that has pushed out the way, moving further east and south. High pressure is building. Squeezing out this weather front, pressure is building. Squeezing out this weatherfront, hugging pressure is building. Squeezing out this weather front, hugging the south coast during the early morning. Temperatures on the mild side, some cloud and drizzle is kept from dropping too glow. Clear skies further north nippy start of the day. In glasgow, 6 degrees first thing, less cold in belfast, 9 degrees, but wherever you are, it will be somewhere within that race. In the far south, 11 or 12 degrees. In the far south, 11 or 12 degrees. In somerset, devon or cornwall, beneath the cloud, even a spot of drizzle, that will quickly fade away and then you are left with a mostly windless day. Sunny skies, and very decent temperatures. Nothing to be sniffed at, across the south of the country, 15 degrees. The winds are stronger across scotland, more arrows here. Blustery winds, they will increase. Change on the way, friday is the best day of the next few. Friday night, and the early hours of saturday, the winds are strengthening. In many North Western parts of the country, cloud returns, drizzle in places, some fog. A great picture on saturday for many of us. In the east of the country, anywhere from aberdeenshire, the borders, hull, and its another sunny day. Saturday into sunday, colder air comes in from the north, not desperately cold but not forecasting a freeze, it will be fresher compared to what we will have had recently. Temperatures on saturday and sunday at eight or 9 degrees across northern areas. Some showers scattered around. The further south the milder it will be. In london, in plymouth, for example, still at the mid teens. A contrast between north and south but relatively settled with high pressure. Later on monday and tuesday, weather fronts coming in from the atlantic. Goodbye. Im mariko 0i in singapore. The headlines nearly 50 dead in an indonesian firework factory the countrys Safety Standards are criticised again. What should the world do about half a million Rohingya Refugees now in bangladesh . Well be asking the uns former head of humanitarian affairs. Im kasia madera in london. Also in the programme. President trump blames chinese suppliers for flooding the us with opiods as he declares a National Public health emergency. Cheap and deadly fentanyl, manufactured in china and 50 times stronger than heroin. And with singapore fashion week in full swing, well be talking to the taiwanese designer who created this dress