Hon. NM Hadebe, MP
Honourable Speaker,
On behalf of the Inkatha Freedom Party, I rise not only as a representative of a political party but as a voice for generations of Africans and people of African descent whose pain, perseverance and power have shaped the conscience of humanity.
Today, we gather under the moral weight of a truth long suppressed: that justice for Africa — and for her global descendants — cannot be realised without reparations. This is not a request. It is a rightful demand. For centuries, Africa was plundered. Its people were stolen, enslaved, dispossessed and dehumanised — fuelling the prosperity of empires while being condemned to poverty, division, and loss.
We say today: reparations are not charity; they are justice. Justice that honours the lived trauma of slavery, colonialism and apartheid — and justice that confronts their enduring legacy in the form of poverty, landlessness, racialised inequality and systemic exclusion. We must understand that the aftershocks of historical wrongs continue to reverberate through the lives of millions of Africans and people of African descent, here and across the diaspora.
The IFP holds firmly that reparations must be meaningful and measurable. This includes financial restitution to redress structural imbalances; investment in education, health, and infrastructure in communities still reeling from centuries of extraction and neglect; and a rewriting of global economic and trade arrangements so that they are fair, inclusive and no longer shaped by neo-colonial designs.
Honourable Speaker, this is not about revenge — it is about restoration. Restoration of dignity, of identity, of agency. Restoration of a people’s right to shape their own destiny in a global system that has for too long treated them as footnotes rather than full participants.
As South Africa takes up the presidency of the G20 under the theme “Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability,” we must give life to these ideals by confronting global injustice at its root. What is solidarity if it does not include the enslaved and the exploited? What is equality if it ignores the historic theft of land, labour, and life? What is sustainability if it seeks to preserve a global economy built on extraction without restoration?
True global justice will remain elusive until we acknowledge that no sustainable future can be built upon the foundations of an unjust past. We believe that our African philosophy of Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — must inform global solidarity. Ubuntu teaches us that justice for one is justice for all — and so the struggle for reparations is not Africa’s burden alone, but humanity’s test of conscience.
Let this generation — our generation — be the one that says: “Enough.” Enough denial. Enough delay. Enough deflection. Let us choose action over apology, restoration over rhetoric, and justice over convenience.
Justice must not be symbolic. It must be structural. And it must begin now.
I thank you.
