Freedom Day is often framed as a commemoration of what was won in 1994 the ballot, the Constitution, the institutions of democracy. This year's Freedom Day theme - "Freedom and the Rule of Law: Thirty-two Years of Democratic Citizenship", invites us to celebrate our constitutional democracy and the legal frameworks that protect it. But freedom is not a finished story; it is a daily obligation. In commemorating freedom, we must look not only at the visible achievements - the Constitution, the institutions, the speeches, but also at the hidden realities in the background: the daily lives of young women and girls, and the boys who grow up alongside them. Ignoring that context is like celebrating democracy while leaving its most urgent tabs unopened.
Thirty-two years later, the paradox is stark: South Africa has some of the most robust legislation protecting women and girls - the Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Offences Act, the Gender-Based Violence and Femicide National Strategic Plan.
Why Young Women and Girls Must Be at the Center
Disproportionate Burden
Youth unemployment exceeds 50%, with young women bearing the brunt of poverty, caregiving, and violence.- they are shut out of the economy, often responsible for domestic labour and caregiving, and frequently the targets of intimate partner violence and sexual coercion. The intersections of race, class, gender, and geography mean that a young Black woman in a township or rural village faces a fundamentally different South Africa than the one we describe in our Freedom Day speeches. Their exclusion is not incidental; it is structural. The rule of law means nothing to a young woman who does not trust that reporting her abuse will lead to justice rather than retaliation. It means nothing to a teenage girl who has never been taught that her body belongs to her, that consent is not negotiable, that a healthy relationship is her birthright, not a fantasy. Freedom, for her, is still an abstract -something she watches celebrated on television while navigating the very real violence of her everyday life.
Freedom Deferred
Femicide rates remain among the highest in the world. A woman is killed by her intimate partner every three to four hours. Girls navigate schools where they fear the person in front of the blackboard more than they fear failing the test. Young women in our communities carry the weight of poverty, early pregnancy, school dropout, and violence simultaneously - as though these are not crises, but simply the terms of being young and female in South Africa. For many girls, constitutional promises of dignity and safety remain abstract.
Freedom is not achieved when the law is written. It is achieved when a girl can walk home at night and feel what the Constitution promises her - safety, dignity, and belonging.
The Case for Intensified Investment
Commemorating freedom without addressing these realities risks hollow patriotism. To honor 1994, South Africa must:
Generational Impact: When young women are denied opportunity, the cycle of poverty and violence deepens across families and communities. Investing in them is not charity - it is nation-building.
Why Boys and Young Men Cannot Be Left Out
Young men and boys are not exempt from this either. Many grow up in environments where violence is modelled as masculinity, where emotional expression is punished, where the only frameworks they are given for navigating power are destructive ones. Without intervention, these norms reproduce harm. Ending gender-based violence requires reshaping the socialization of boys alongside empowering girls. Freedom cannot be gendered; it must be collective.
Why Freedom is a Daily Obligation
The unfinished work of democracy is not only to protect rights on paper but to make them lived realities. Our democracy acknowledges both the visible progress and the hidden struggles. Investing in young women and girls, while reshaping the pathways for boys, is how South Africa will move from commemorating freedom to accomplishing it. Freedom Day, then, is not just remembrance; it is a call to intensify the work of liberation where it is most urgent - in the lives of the young.
A call to all South Africans
The Work Is Ours - All of Us
Here is what I am asking of each of us:
01 - Name the gap. Refuse the comfortable narrative that the work is done. Look at the young women in your community, your family, your organisation, and ask honestly: what freedoms do they not yet hold? Naming is the beginning of accountability.
02 - Invest in prevention, not just response. Government, funders, and civil society must shift resources upstream - into programmes that reach young people before crisis, not only after. Healing is essential; prevention is transformative.
03 - Include young people as architects, not beneficiaries. The young women and men living these realities have both the analysis and the solutions. Bring them to the table. Fund their organisations. Amplify their voices.
04 - Hold the rule of law accountable. Attend your community police forum. Know your ward councillor. Demand that cases of gender-based violence are prosecuted with urgency. Democracy works only when citizens actively exercise it.
05 - Change begins in how we model behaviour. Parents, teachers, coaches, and elders who practise respect, name inequality, and raise boys differently are already shaping a freer future. This work is quieter than policy - but far more powerful.
06 - We are thirty-two years into democracy, and we are not done. But we are not starting from nothing. We carry the courage of those who came before us, and we are accountable to those who come after. This Freedom Day, I am asking you to carry both.
In solidarity and in service,
Phinah Kodisang