Madam Deputy Speaker, Mr President, Mr Deputy President, the Leader of the Opposition - I come in peace ... [Interjections.] ... fellow members and South Africans, the state of the nation address and the two subsequent days of debate that we have had, have been marked essentially by two contrasting standpoints.
On the one hand, a President and an ANC-led government sharing with the country a perspective and a report card on important progress that is underway across a wide scope of sectors and regions in our country. This is concrete progress, notwithstanding the many challenges. It is being achieved not by government or by the ANC alone but it is progress that we are making together as South Africans ... [Applause.] ... through consultations, popular mobilization, and often very tough engagements, sometimes in the midst of crises in which competing sectoral interests are aired and a common line of action has to be thrashed out with the active leadership of the President and the ANC-led government. That is one side of the state of the nation debate. It is an ANC and an ANC-led government taking responsibility for listening to, engaging with and mobilising the energies and aspirations of the widest array of South Africans across the public and private sectors. On the other side in this debate, with the few welcome exceptions of the speakers for the APC, Azapo and the UDM - which was a little bit of an Umtata worldview but nonetheless a constructive contribution ... [Interjections.] ... we have spectators while South Africa moves on. [Applause.] These are spectators who are carping and who are filled with negativity and divisiveness. [Interjections.]
The President and the subsequent ANC speakers in this debate have laid great stress - as the hon Harris has just said - on the National Development Plan, NDP. The President correctly noted that it has been endorsed by a very wide spectrum of South Africans as a 20-year vision and as a broad road map to address the triple challenge of poverty, inequality and crisis levels of unemployment. [Interjections.] This is our approach to the NDP.
The opposition parties have also endorsed, or should I say have paid lip service to the plan, but what informs their approach? Once again, we saw it with the hon Harris a moment ago. They support the NDP for very ignoble objectives. It is not to build collective South African unity in action, but rather to be divisive and oppositional for the sake of opposition, and to drive in wedges. They seek to twist and distort the NDP to pit government against the labour movement and the ANC against teachers. They vainly want to play the NDP off against the New Growth Path, NGP. They seek to launch the unemployed against the working poor and outsiders against insiders. This sentimentality with regard to outsiders is about driving in wedges between those who are lucky enough to have some kind of poverty wage employment. It is not concern, and I will talk about that in a moment.
We have now also heard an attempt to drive a wedge between the SACP and the ANC. This may be ageist, but let me make it very clear that long before the hon Harris was born, I was an active ANC supporter. [Applause.] I stand here as an ANC member, as an ANC Deputy Minister, and a proud South African communist. Don't try to drive wedges in there, because you will find no gaps to drive in wedges. [Interjections.] [Applause.]
Let me give examples of this wedge-indriving. [Interjections.] The hon Mazibuko, the Leader of the Opposition, writing in the Sunday Independent this past Sunday, tells us that President Zuma "pays nominal lip service" - the lip service that they pay - "to the National Development Plan". "But his heart" - supposedly that of the President - "is with the outdated heavy hand of the government of the NGP. He remains wedded to the discredited concept of government interventionism in the economy."
So, good NDP, bad NGP is the game that they are trying to play. Bizarrely, in the very next sentence, the hon Mazibuko, or probably the speech writers ... [Laughter.] ... advise President Zuma to look at the success of our fellow Brics partners. Do the speech writers or the hon Mazibuko seriously believe that the economic practices in India, Brazil, Russia or China are less state interventionist than here in South Africa? [Laughter.] Is she honestly asking us to believe that? The DA portrays ... it's just laughable ... the NDP as if it was essentially a laissez-faire manifesto. Leave business to business and let the market drive the market, they tell us. That's exactly what the hon Harris has just said. [Interjections.] Government shouldn't second-guess the so-called market, they say, hiding behind their misrepresentation of the NDP.
That arch-Thatcherite and supercilious hon Lorimer of the DA told us yesterday if there was money to be made in beneficiation, then business would have done it long ago. There you have it. Beneath all their professed concern for the poor and the unemployed, the real yardstick - from their side - of the viability of anything is whether the short-term megaprofits can be sucked out of South Africa and whether the voracious appetites ... [Applause.] ... of a cosmopolitan few can be fed. If not, the hon Lorimer is telling us that it can't and shouldn't be done otherwise ... [Interjections.] ... business would have done it. You might as well say that we shouldn't deal with acid mine drainage and the serious problem in Gauteng because, after all, if there was money to be made from it, then business would have done it a long time ago. That's how ludicrous their position is. [Interjections.]
Our position and our yardstick of what should be done and what is economically, socially and environmentally necessary and desirable ... [Interjections.] ... is about what is sustainable. It's about what is in the interests of long-term sustainability of growth and job creation, and it's a perspective we believe that is shared by most South Africans, including serious businesspeople and serious investors. [Interjections.]
While decrying the alleged interventionist nature of the NGP - I am honouring hon Harris' wish' as I'm talking about the NGP or of our beneficiation policies - the DA quickly abandons its free market fundamentalism when it comes to dealing with the working class and the labour market. Here, of course, they want autocratic state intervention in the market. The hon Mazibuko reacted to Thursday's state of the nation address by saying that the President had failed to intervene decisively by not unilaterally, top-down proclaiming the implementation of the youth wage subsidy. They want the President to act in an authoritarian, interventionist way in the labour market against workers ... [Interjections.] ... but otherwise it must be hands-off and leave the market to itself. [Interjections.]
Your attempts to goad government into antiworker, union-bashing have also been in evidence on the education front. The hon Wilmot James and the DA know perfectly well that it's not just the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Cosatu, and its affiliate, the South African Democratic Teachers Union, Sadtu, that have raised deep concerns about banning the right of teachers to strike. All the federations and teacher professional bodies have opposed such a move, which is why the hon James moved very delicately in that area.
Of course, the Rev Kenneth Meshoe is less subtle. [Laughter.] We are into the Oscar - not that other Oscar, but the Oscar film awards - season ... [Laughter.] ... and the Rev Kenneth Meshoe must surely receive a belated nomination for best male comedy act. [Laughter.] He told us in the post state of the nation address, after eight debate on the SA Broadcasting Corporation, SABC, that teachers should be allowed to strike only after work. [Laughter.] Now that really does merit an Oscar. [Laughter.]
Of course, seeking to build consensus does not mean that as the ANC-led government we should not take a firm line on key principles and provide leadership, not just to the union movement, but also to the business sector, communities and all South Africans. The President did this by clearly signalling that in the legitimate exercise of the right to strike or protest this government will not tolerate violence, the injuring or killing of others or the wanton destruction of property, especially but not only public property. The President spent two to four minutes making this point.
In another Oscar-winning performance, a certain leader - name withheld - of a certain opposition political party, was so busy handing out Valentine flower bouquets on Thursday ... [Laughter.] ... that he forgot to listen to the President's speech. [Laughter.] That was the purpose of Thursday's event. He told the public broadcaster immediately after the President's speech ... [Laughter.] [Applause.]