Madam Deputy Speaker and hon members, Olivier Bernier wrote in Words of Fire, Deeds of Blood that:
The French Revolution, in less than four years changed the world. From the moment Louis XVI walked up the stairs of the guillotine, no other European Monarch felt safe again. France gave itself a constitution and a legislature. The liberties the French claimed for themselves - of religion, of the press, of assembly, of thought; the right to be taxed only if their representatives had first consented; equality before the law; and the end of privileges - all these startling innovations soon appeared to be the normal requirements without which no state could claim legitimacy.
Centuries on, the long and tortuous struggle waged by black people in South Africa against colonial exploitation and the legendary oppressive apartheid rule, culminated in the victorious constitutional and parliamentary democracy inclusive of all the people of South Africa.
South Africans, like the French, won for themselves substantive rights and freedoms without which the apartheid state failed to claim legitimacy. Ideally, the vision of the newly founded democratic legislature from the year 1994 was to build an effective peoples' Parliament responsive to the needs of all the people driven by the idea of realising a better quality of life for all the people of South Africa.
A decade and a half later, in the year 2009, the call by President Jacob Zuma, and subsequently by the Speaker of the National Assembly, hon M Sisulu, for the emergence of the activist parliament and state, demanded of this fourth Parliament a new paradigm and an active review of the manner in which the legislatures respond to the needs of the people, in particular those of the majority of South Africans who continue to toil under the yoke of grinding poverty, systematic, social and economic deprivation, racism, intolerance and underdevelopment.
The new paradigm should mean that the sovereignty of Parliament and the state, the actions of the executive, should reflect the activities and liberties of all citizens. The hon Ben Turok asserted recently elsewhere that the programmes of the executive should be driven by the people themselves in order to attain optimum social and economic development. I must say that this is a long-standing maxim of development theorists and practitioners.
We believe this state of affairs would be partly experienced where the executive did not view the legislature as the adversary, where it did not feel it had to defend the fallibility inherent in the state before Parliament. Recently, the hon T M Masutha also affirmed, rightly so, that the executive should be regarded as an integral part of the parliamentary oversight mechanism.
Activism on the part of the legislature and the executive will require loyal adherence to the principles of egalitarianism, and will seek to promote participatory planning and project implementation to remove inequitable socioeconomic conditions. The manner in which we have pursued service delivery so far has been lacking in this egalitarian respect, and thus has threatened to turn the current process of service delivery into a tool for perpetual dependency, underdevelopment and permanent civil unrest. Fortunately, the Green Papers on National Strategic Planning and on Improving Government Performance by the Ministers in the Presidency envisioned the incorporation of the dreams of South Africans about the future they want to have. The short and long-term strategic plans, the goals and objectives will be interwoven in the social, economic, political, moral, religious and cultural aspirations of the citizens.
Rousseau maintained that:
The state could serve as an instrument of freedom only when all its subjects were at the same time sovereign, for then alone would the people be truly said to rule themselves.
For 15 years in this Assembly, we have deliberated, and legislated with a firm belief fired by political party manifestos and elections, that there is a contract between Parliament and the people; and between the state and the citizens. Factually, we have acknowledged, in part only, the obligation placed on Parliament and the state by this contract. We have unwittingly neglected the fact that there should be quality of partnership in the contract; it should include the people as co-decision makers, co-planners, co-implementers, co-monitors and co-evaluators of the laws and projects that are meant to change their lives for the better. Unless the legislatures and the executive adopt participatory planning as a necessary process in the government's development agenda, the country will find it difficult to shake off the rampage arising from the civil protests that have gone beyond the realm of peaceful expressions of discontent, and have become appallingly violent and destructive.
The success of the developmental state, which the government is now pursuing with such vigour, will depend largely on the kind of activism that places greater emphasis on the component of human development and reserves direct state intervention for public safety, redressing the imbalances of the past, welfare programmes and protective security.
Equally, distributive economic justice will require from the legislatures and the executive the kind of activism that will promote strong participatory economic development, where the economic potentials of the majority are unlocked and economic self-management is enhanced. Perhaps, what we are trying to say here to Parliament and the executive is that we should refrain from perceiving the poor and marginalised majority of our people as passive, helpless recipients of social services, but rather as potential owners, controllers and managers of South Africa's economic resources and wealth.
Finally, how else could we translate into reality what Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said in Davos early this year when responding to the global economic slump; that it was an opportunity for the nations of the world to think of a new world economic order and rectify the negative implications of uneven international economic interdependence; while President Jacob Zuma said of the slump that it presented good opportunities for South Africa to really look at its own ... [Interjections.]