Hon Chairperson, fellow members of the House, in the wake of the depression years of 1929 to 1933, one of the communities that found itself extremely disadvantaged was the Jewish community of the United States. Not only was it discriminated against, but also persecuted everywhere in Europe, as well as in the United States.
Confronted with this dilemma, like the majority of the people of our country, it also did not have opportunities for education and skills in abundance. The Jewish community then met and took a very practical, yet very well-thought-out decision. It resolved that every Jewish family must send at least one child into the teaching profession, nursing, or something of that nature. This is because they understoon that transformation of the human resource was the answer for them to come out of their poverty and backwardness.
After a few generations, the Jewish community came to occupy a leading position in American society. Indeed, to this day, its influence, its strength and its capacity continue to persist.
I recalled, as we were reflecting on this debate, that some time after I was released from Robben Island in the early 1980s, we had a discussion with some of the leading thinkers in the movement in KwaZulu-Natal. In the course of that discussion, some of the leading thinkers in the Indian community drew our attention to the fact that most Indian doctors, lawyers and advocates were children of educators, nurses and so on. That community had adopted a more or less similar strategy in that transformation of the human resource was the answer to taking the community out of backwardness, poverty, etc.
But there is an even more instructive example, even though it has some negatives here and there. A very instructive example, similar to these two, is what the leadership of the Afrikaner community did when it came to power. What they did was to identify the fact that they needed to transform the human resource - train the young people, send them to schools, give them the necessary skills. The poorest of families that had also come through the depression years - the late 1920s and the early 1930s - were able, in almost one generation, to do away with poverty and backwardness, because these young people were transformed into pilots of trains, engineers, etc.
If we look across the face of our country today and see advancement in infrastructure development, it has to do with how that was done. The tragedy of that exercise is that the minority that was governing did not have the foresight to think that it must not just train white children, but train and expose to education all the children of our nation. Had that been done, we would not be sitting where we are today where education and training are available to one section and lacking elsewhere.
But then, of course, it is critical that today we stand as a people and say to ourselves that that much has been the nature of the problem. How can we take control of the conditions of our country today?
We can do this by learning from these three different experiments and by transforming our society - the human resource element - so that we collectively, as a united nation, tackle the future and, in a few generations' time, transform ourselves into a united force of transformation and development and raise our nation to where it really belongs.
There may be some doubts about what I am saying, but two days ago I was in Johannesburg and thought that if Julius Malema owed the SA Revenue Service R16 million in tax, how much money did he steal? [Time expired.] [Interjections.] [Applause.]