Congresswoman Waters Receives Prestigious Award in South Africa
Yesterday, in Pretoria, South African President Thabo Mbeki presented Congresswoman Maxine Waters (CA-35) with the "Order of the Companions of OR Tambo Silver Award," one of the most prestigious awards granted by the South African government. Congresswoman Waters received this great honor because of her work on behalf of the people of South Africa throughout her career, especially her role in fighting against the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
"I am deeply honored to receive South Africa's most prestigious award, the Companion of OR Tambo. I thank President Mbeki for recognizing my contribution to ending apartheid. This is a day I will never forget," said Waters during the presentation ceremony.
Throughout the 1980s, Congresswoman Waters organized marches and rallies in Los Angeles to protest the racist system of apartheid in South Africa. She led sit-ins at the South African consular office in Los Angeles and put her own freedom on the line when she was arrested for protesting the apartheid regime in front of the South African Consulate in Washington, D.C.
In 1986, as a member of the California Assembly, Rep. Waters called for the divestment of funds from corporations doing business with South Africa's apartheid regime and helped to make the call for divestment a national movement sweeping from state to state and city to city. She did this by authoring Assembly Bill 134, to divest a record $12 billion from public pension funds in California, thus fortifying California's opposition to the apartheid regime.
In 1987, the Los Angeles Free South Africa Movement, which Rep. Waters chaired, welcomed President Oliver Reginald Tambo, the president of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) and the man for whom the OR Tambo Award was named, at a standing-room only gathering at Trinity Baptist Church.
In 1990, when ANC leader Nelson Mandela made an 8-city tour of the U.S., Rep. Waters chaired the welcoming committee that greeted him and his wife Winnie Mandela with a motorcade to City Hall, a Hollywood star-studded reception, and a 6-hour concert and rally attended by 90,000 supporters.
The following year, Rep. Waters traveled to South Africa for the first time to attend the ANC national conference in Durban, South Africa, the first ANC conference since the unbanning of the ANC and Nelson Mandela's release from prison. Three years later, following the dismantling of apartheid and South Africa's first democratic elections, she was a member of the official U.S. delegation to attend the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela in Pretoria.
Congresswoman Waters has continued to be a friend to the people of South Africa, as well as oppressed people across Africa and throughout the world. For the past nine years, she has lead congressional efforts to cancel the debts of the world's poorest countries. In 1999, she worked with the Clinton Administration and her colleagues in Congress, to develop the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative to reduce the debts of poor countries in Africa and throughout the world, thereby enabling them to invest their resources in health care, education, poverty reduction and other programs that meet human needs. On July 13, 2000, Waters offered an amendment on the Floor of the House of Representatives to increase funding for this important initiative from $69 million – an inadequate amount supported by House Republican leadership – to $225 million. The passage of the Waters amendment led to the full funding of the HIPC Initiative by the Republican Congress.
Congresswoman Waters has continued her efforts to expand and improve debt relief programs for poor countries through legislation and public advocacy. In 2005, she and other debt relief advocates convinced the leaders of the G-8 creditor nations to completely cancel the debts of over twenty of the world's poorest countries. Last year, she introduced H.R. 2634, the Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation. This bill would expand existing debt cancellation programs and ensure that the benefits from debt cancellation will not be eroded by future lending to these impoverished nations. This bill now has 98 cosponsors.
The Congresswoman was also a leader of congressional efforts to restore democracy and protect human rights in Haiti and Liberia, and she is now working to expedite complete debt cancellation for these two needy and deserving countries.
Congresswoman Waters also leads congressional efforts to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which infects over 18% of the adult population of South Africa. She is currently the Co-Chair of the CBC Task Force on HIV/AIDS. She has introduced legislation to allow people in developing countries like South Africa to have access to generic HIV/AIDS drugs at affordable prices, and she is working with her colleagues to increase funding for international HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs.
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