Madam Deputy Speaker, the Cross-Boundary Municipalities Laws Repeal and Related Matters Bill flows from the Constitution Thirteenth Amendment Bill, whose aim is to correct a defect, as reflected earlier, of the province of KwaZulu-Natal not having held public hearings during the processing of the principal Act and the Constitution. We had to retrace our steps, so to speak, and reintroduce the laws again. And, as is the practice in the committee and as we did before, we requested both departmental interaction and briefings and public submissions to help us decide whether or not to support the Bill as presented.
The circumstances the Bill deals with are complex and not simple. Since we were not conducting a referendum per se, we scrutinised the submissions for persuasive arguments to sway us against the proposed Bill, as presented to us.
I thought that it would be appropriate to share with members someone who reflected on leadership challenges, which are relevant to our discussions here today, because this is about leadership and it signifies our differences with the opposition profoundly.
In a book called Leadership on the Line, the writers argue as follows:
To lead is to live dangerously, because when leadership counts, when you lead people through difficult change, you challenge what people hold dear, their daily habits, loyalties and ways of thinking, with nothing more to offer perhaps than a possibility.
Moreover, leadership often means exceeding the authority you are given to tackle the challenge at hand. People push back when you disturb the personal and institutional equilibrium they know. And people resist in all kinds of creative and unexpected ways that can get you taken out of the game.
This speaks to the leadership experience of the ANC. It has never neglected or abdicated its responsibility to provide leadership to the people it comes from. We have never been merely comfortable being born of the people, but have always accepted the responsibility to provide leadership. This means that we accepted that even if people wanted to have the comfort, for example, from their inception as tribal groupings to fight, that did not succeed and this is why the ANC was formed.
We did not become comfortable with the reality that the organisation was made up of professionals, traditional leaders and so on. We insisted on the involvement of women over time. We insisted on the involvement of workers over time and, of course, we also did not only insist that the organisation embrace the role of women inside the organisation, but also that gender equality must be the objective of the organisation; in short, it could have been very easy for us to say this is what the people would prefer to do, but we said we are bigger and greater than parochially our interests may be.
In that sense, what we did in this instance was not only to listen to what people were saying, but to look at what the leadership responsibilities are that we have. We conducted our review of the Bill and submissions from the public, fully aware that the provinces, as stated earlier, were going to be given an opportunity to express their views further. We were also mindful of the bigger picture, as I said: the objectives of the legislation to remove impediments to effective service delivery in the areas affected.
The changes in the population and in the political leadership and in the staffing of these organisations were profound following the elections. So, it would be very difficult for us, this judgment having come five months after March, to simply accept a reversal of those with ease.
The current service delivery problems cannot be treated in those areas as permanent features, not that anybody ever suggested it. In fact, the reality is that increasing resources, as argued earlier here, are going into those areas to make a difference in those conditions. We trust that the Ministers present here today and those not here will continue to pressure their departments to speed up contributions in those areas in order to address people's concerns, so that these, being at the heart of some of the concerns people are raising, are addressed.
The Cabinet's decision, following the Local Government: Municipal Demarcation Act, that all departments must align their service delivery boundaries with municipal boundaries, remains an outstanding job. This unfinished business is directly responsible, in part for the concerns that are being raised. Technology and people deployment must be harnessed effectively to achieve those objectives. The roll-out of the Thusong centres more vigorously will go a long way towards meeting people's concerns where they live.
Our stance in support of the Bill is intended to facilitate the meeting of people's underlying concerns about service delivery, to spare provinces, the municipalities and other national departments further institutional and administrative and political changes that are themselves not cheap, so that we help to focus the energies of the state institutions and those of the people themselves on the great task of dealing with poverty, and dealing with it effectively. I thank you. [Applause.]