Acting Speaker, I am quite aware that the subject itself is very broad, and rightly so, so that we can all have a bite of it. I will briefly deal with the first aspect of it and one of my colleagues will deal with the last aspect of it, namely for the region. Hon members, both the Ministers of Finance and Public Service and Administration dealt with the idea of South Africa being a developmental state some time ago. Today we have heard that the hon Minister of Communications is also joining in on that.
I have often grappled intensely with the question, of whether as a political collective, as public representatives in the House and among the custodians of the Rousseauian contract with the people - the social contract if you like - we have in fact, come to a common understanding of what a developmental state should mean to all South Africans. So far we have accepted and embraced the notions of a constitutional and the democratic state. As a result, we have encountered less difficulty in building the relevant institutions to make these concepts meaningful to the ordinary South African men and women in the streets. I must say that hon members should please take credit for that.
However, the crucial question remains whether we possess the capabilities to do likewise with the ideals of a developmental state, whether we could master the necessary courage and insight to define development in the terms of its normative goals to realise the well-being of the poor and the marginalised. Umer Chapra, in his book "The Future of Economics and Islamic Perspective" argues that these goals may include not only economic well- being but also human brotherhood and socio-economic justice, sanctity of life, property, individual honour, mental peace, happiness, family, as well as social harmony; whereas, Denis Goulet defines development as choices and too often in interstate affairs, the choice is increasingly cruel against the poor nations.
One of the major problems dogging the north-south trade agreements is the variant meaning of development. Obviously, the rich nations of the world understand development to mean the maximisation of wealth and consumption for their own people. Similarly, the poor nations also seek a better life for their own people, but the state of under-development has become their pervasive weakness.
Another author, Ammartya Sen, among other development writers and practitioners, sees development as freedom borne out of the removal of substantive unfreedoms such as poverty, unemployment, poor health, illiteracy and social deprivation. To realise this noble goal, the poor and the marginalised must have full access to political freedoms, social opportunities, economic facilities, transparency guarantees and protective security.
Closer to home, I must also ask: Do we regard development as a tool for distributive justice or has it become, and by default of the people, a concentration of economic wealth and power in the hands of a few? Thirteen years of liberation, and for a people emerging from a society marked by huge wealth disparities, deep social inequalities, racial and repressive legislation, how much progress has the developmental state made in discarding the elements of the post-war, colonial and apartheid economic development planning? It is a historical fact that the primary objective of this economic planning was to maximise wealth and consumption for the white minority to wield political and economic power, imposing in the process a heavy burden of perpetual poverty and hardships on the African majority. To what extent has the development enabled the people to effect a revolutionary eradication of the psychological damages inflicted by the Verwoerdian concept of master-servant education, whose long-term consequences have become an impediment to all forms of freedoms?
Some will argue that, why do you blame Dr Verwoerd when more than two centuries before him, the likes of Herodotus, Hegel and Montesquieu, just to name a few, had laid the foundation of all racial prejudices against the African people for centuries to come? Therefore, the fate of racism for us has been a history of the myth of the European people. Change cannot be realised overnight.
Should it not be historically, theoretically and practically inherent in the developmental state to inject at all levels a radical development paradigm that says the people ... [Interjections.]