Media Statements

The African National Congress joins the people of South Africa and the broader liberation movement in commemorating the life and legacy of Comrade Martin Thembisile “Chris” Hani who remains a revolutionary stalwart, people’s Commissar, and fearless Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the people’s glorious army. His life was dedicated to the liberation of the oppressed people of South Africa and the realisation of a truly free, united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa.

On this day, we remember in mourning, with pain and reverence the cowardly brutal assassination of a towering Commissar Hani on 10 April 1993 by agents of the heinous apartheid regime and their right-wing extremist collaborators. His murder was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to collapse negotiations, provoke civil war, and halt the inevitable victory of the democratic forces. But true to the revolutionary discipline of the ANC and the profound political maturity of the people of South Africa, the nation responded with restraint and unity. In refusing to be provoked, the masses turned their grief into strength and in doing so, they carried the baton of liberation over the final hurdle toward freedom.

Commissar Chris Hani was more than a political leader for the people of South Africa; he was a servant of the working class and the poor, a gender activist, a combatant who shared trenches with rank-and-file soldiers in the Wankie-Sipolilo campaign, and an ideologue whose Marxist-Leninist convictions never wavered. As National Executive Committee of the ANC and General Secretary of the South African Communist Party he embodied the shared history of struggle waged by both parties, and a deep understanding of the unity of purpose between national liberation and class struggle.

His vision was never for a democracy in name only, but for a South Africa where land, wealth, and power are fundamentally redistributed to serve the people. As we mark 32 years since his assassination, we must reaffirm that the programme of renewal and ethical leadership must be anchored in his revolutionary ideals and convictions in the unshakable foundation of the Freedom Charter which is our discern vision to transform the lived realities of poverty, unemployment and inequality.

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