Hon Speaker, Comrade Minister Mthethwa and all members, the march to restore the dignity of our African majority is unstoppable, even by those who claim to represent our people during the day and connive with corporate big business during the night. [Applause.]
We enter this House today, inspired by the collective heritage of the struggle of the people of South Africa, united in diversity, to create a country where everyone will live in peace, equality, harmony and common fraternity. This struggle was not rosy, but a battleground littered with corpses and the blood of innocent men, women, workers, young people and children of our country. Our people, led by the ANC, came together in Kliptown to adopt a road map for their liberation, the Freedom Charter.
As we seek to break with this painful past, we do so inspired by these heroic men, women, young people and workers of our country, who laid down their lives in the line of duty to liberate our country from the bondages of the monstrous and diabolical system of white minority domination.
This evokes painful memories of the abduction, torture and inhuman killing of our people by the apartheid death squads. The DA does not even attempt to reflect on this historical background.
Our memory goes back to Cradock in 1985, where our late comrades, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Qaqawuli Godolozi Sipho Hashe, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli were abducted and killed gruesomely.
Madiba declared that their deaths marked a turning point in the history of our struggle throughout the country. Yes, indeed, the 1980s were characterised by a period where young people took to the frontline of our struggle to demand their human rights. This clearly reveals how, by its very nature, the apartheid regime was inherently an anti-human-rights culture.
No amount of political posturing, neither historical nor contemporary archival evidence, can disprove the fact that as we speak today about a human rights culture in this country, we do so because of the ANC. [Applause.] The marginalisation of the black and African majority from economic ownership and participation, and the denial of access to basic rights like education, health and social security - including access to basic services like water, electricity, housing and security - were all apartheid machinations declared by the international community as inhuman.
The Freedom Charter, our road map to the future as a nation and a country, remains our loadstar for the human rights culture that we seek to build today. There has never arisen a single document by any political force in this country that can equal the Freedom Charter in terms of appeal to the broad masses of our people. [Applause.]
While building on this vision and road map inspired by the collective wisdom and experiences of our people, the ANC further articulated in its 1969 document, Strategy and Tactics, and other subsequent policy documents that there can be no meaningful political freedom without the economic emancipation of the historically oppressed and colonised in South Africa. It is for this reason that the ANC has always understood economic freedom not as an isolated aspect of the struggle or a momentous discovery of an idea, but as integral to the overall strategic objectives of fundamental social transformation. The history of South Africa is replete with evidence of failed attempts by many forces in this country that sought to evoke narrow economism as an attempt to position themselves as alternatives to the ANC. In all its manifestations, this tendency is always driven by sheer populist demagogy, which seeks to pander to the sentiments of the masses without a concrete programme or clear vision. [Applause.]
We stand here today as the family of the ANC, proud of our past and confident of our future. [Applause.] We do so, drawing inspiration from one of our own, the late Comrade O R Tambo, when he said in 1985:
The future is bright. The end is glorious; it is peaceful. But the intervening period is dark, bitter and finds its glory in the act of struggle.
[Applause.] We are indeed proud that today South Africa, a developing nation, stands toe to toe with most developed economies in terms of the fight against poverty, as recently reported by the World Bank. In the spirit of the Freedom Charter, we have introduced a growing social safety net, which has been critical in the alleviation of poverty.
The ANC-led government has, amongst other things, introduced free primary health care, no-fee schools, social grants - notably old-age pensions and child support grants - state-subsidised housing and the provision of basic services and millions of state-subsidised houses. You have had and you have enjoyed its privileges for decades. Only now are our people enjoying their fundamental human rights. [Applause.]
This is a vast improvement from the 1990s, when more than 40% of our people lived in poverty with no access to water, sanitation, electricity, education or many other basics under the apartheid rule. Our country is indeed the epitome of the Freedom Charter as we weather storm after storm to deliver on the vision formulated in Kliptown in 1955.
Despite the global economic meltdown, our economy still displays resilience and indeed we remain on course to deliver on the mandate of the Freedom Charter. We are continuing to ensure that our people's rights, engraved in the Freedom Charter and epitomised in the Bill Of Rights, are upheld at all levels of our government since 1994.
In 1991, South Africa had a Gini coefficient of 0,68 and it stood at 0,61 in 2013. We do acknowledge that this is not enough, but the more than 0,07 decline in the gap between the rich and the poor since 1994 cannot be dismissed.
All the achievements I mentioned are a product of people's participation in governance. We have created various platforms across all three spheres of governance to ensure that our people are not mere passive recipients of government's decisions, but that they become an active part of those decision-making processes.
We will be the first to acknowledge that a lot still needs to be done across a wide spectrum of social issues. However, there can be no denying that the ANC is on track in terms of delivering on the Freedom Charter mandate and, indeed, the people are governing. [Applause.]
Our 2014 election manifesto remains our guide in bridging the gap created by the remaining backlogs in the provision of water, electricity and sanitation. Indeed, we applaud the recently launched Back to Basics programme, which will become the vehicle through which we will upscale the provision of these basic rights to our people.
The escalating global contradictions of capitalism and the concomitant increase in the levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality pose a serious threat to our efforts to build a caring society. This calls for a fundamental rethink on how Parliament as a tribune of the people should exercise its oversight and the task of deepening popular participation. It is through this that we can ensure that the caring society we seek to build is firmly placed in the hands of our people, thus becoming agents of their own future. We dare not fail in this task, hence the ongoing debate on building an activist Parliament continues to occupy centre stage in our strategic reflection.
Often, our discourse on a human rights culture tends to be limited to the role and capacity of our law enforcement agencies. This narrow view loses sight of the fundamental task of forging a collective sense of human solidarity within our society by mitigating the emerging subculture of crass materialism and consumerism in the midst of poverty that continues to define our majority.
Culture cannot be legislated. You build culture and you sustain it through the value systems that you embrace. [Applause.] None of us can afford to come here and adopt a political posture without genuinely engaging with the daily struggles that our people are faced with. The ANC will continue to march unhindered in implementing the Freedom Charter. [Applause.]