Speaker, President, hon members, many of you will recall a very significant verse in Julius Caesar - the famous Shakespearean play - in which Brutus said:
There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. The state of the nation address by the President clearly outlines a set of important projects and programmes that are designed to make a critical difference to our success rate in responding to job creation, skills development and poverty eradication.
The contributions to the debate yesterday, primarily from the ANC and some from the opposition, pointed to the complex sets of demands and mandate confronting government, this Parliament and the people of South Africa. The debate confirmed a truism stated more than once by the President in his speech: It is only through working together that we will achieve our ambitions. The problems of South Africa are not for this government alone, they require each one of us to share this resolve to do more and to do it better. They require ambition, commitment, rational thought and a full grasp of the nature of the tasks that confront us.
The challenges are as tough as those that the ANC faced under apartheid, but they are not as easy to respond to. We need a return to an intellectual tradition that has been part of the ANC for all the years of its existence. The ANC, as an organisation that has always been able to draw on the lessons of history and craft relevant and appropriate responses, an organisation that spoke with honesty of the tribulations of its people with clarity of vision and thought, an intimate and shared understanding of the plight of the marginalised and dispossessed masses, an organisation able to inspire millions, is indefatigable in its ability to respond. The ANC has a respected tradition of mature, rational thinking. This is why its early leaders believed appeal to fairness via petitioning was possible in its formative years. This is followed by recognition that active mass mobilisation had to be entrenched as part of popular political activism followed by national campaigns that gave rise to national instruments such as the African Claims document, and an inclusive national Freedom Charter. The crafting of the Strategy and Tactics document and its consistent renewal, the development of a newspaper by the first ANC president, a vocational school and educational establishments such as Ohlange, Lovedale and Healdtown Adams College all bear testimony to the importance the ANC has always given to intellectual thoughtfulness, planning and contextual innovation.
You could hear yesterday that many hon colleagues in the opposition had not been beneficiaries of this tradition. The hon McGluwa and others failed to read the synthesis of our policy instruments: the Freedom Charter into the Bill of Rights; the Reconstruction and Development Programme, RDP, into the New Growth Path, NGP; from Growth, Employment and Redistribution, Gear, and the Industrial Policy Action Plan, Ipap - all united, all unifying.
The intractable problems and challenges of today require such innovation and thoughtfulness. We cannot rely on the old ways, we need to devise new responses; we need to think, to plan differently, to be rational rather than polemic, to be weary of slogans, undefined concepts and unsubstantiated vision statements. We need, hon Speaker and members, to use knowledge to advance our goals.
Today, all nations of the world are confronted by the question: How do we use the opportunities embedded in knowledge to develop a thriving knowledge economy that enhances our natural attributes and offers sustainable responses to our development challenges? The Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development, OECD, in its Reason Towards Green Growth Policies document, replied as follows:
While dealing with immediate problems such as high unemployment, inflationary pressures or fiscal deficits, we have to look to the future and devise new ways of ensuring that the growth and progress we have come to take for granted are assured in the years to come.
A return to business as usual would indeed be unwise and ultimately unsustainable. We have to find new ways of producing and consuming what we mean by progress and how we measure it. We have to make sure that we take our citizens with us on this journey, in particular, to prepare the people with the right skills to reap the employment benefits from structural change and not business as usual.
I believe that some hon members were so intent on seeking out inadequacy that they missed out on the new knowledge economy opportunities you tabled for South Africa. You reflected the ability to discern and grab opportunities signalled by Brutus in the section I quoted a few moments ago when he said, "we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures".
Mr President, in announcing South Africa's commitment to building a world- class astronomy infrastructure such as MeerKAT and the Square Kilometre Array, SKA, you indicated that the President, his government and the ANC are seizing the current. When your Cabinet agrees that South Africa can use its fluoro-chemical wealth to enter the field of manufacturing application programming interface, APIs, for a new pharmaceutical programme in South Africa, you grabbed the current. Our recent announcement that Cabinet has supported a R1,6 billion South Africa-Swiss venture to build a factory that will produce APIs here in South Africa and thus substantially reduce the costs of the antiretrovirals, ARVs, and ultimately pulmonary tuberculosis TB, and malaria medication, is a major step forward for innovation and science in our country. It will kick-start our quest to become one of the top emerging economies in the global pharmaceutical industry.
Speaker, President, these developments create the knowledge infrastructure and the research opportunities for our researchers, our cell biologists, our Masters' graduates and our Doctoral graduates to generate responsive and innovative solutions to our development challenges and hence real work and sustainable growth for our growing number of knowledge workers. If we continue in this way, the ANC tradition of being ready for all eventualities, the emerging markets and Africa are the new frontiers for knowledge industries, we have, Mr President, to seize the moment.
Information and communications technology, ICT, offers immense development opportunities for our society. Quality educators could be available to all of our children at the touch of a switch. A full curriculum passage can go home with every learner, every day in the palm of their hand. Information and communications technology also offers enterprise opportunity for village-based solar powered Internet cafs. We have these opportunities and millions could benefit if each of us took on these national obligations. Just as millions joined the call to defy, so today, they must join the call to build and develop.
When your Cabinet, Mr President, supports the development of titanium beneficiation and invest millions in creating plants to produce titanium powder using novel technologies, innovatively developed by South African scientists, you move South Africa from extraction and marginalisation to value addition, innovation and sustainable development. The massive infrastructure plans you referred to, Mr President, and our strategies for enhancing the quality of education and health, are a small part of a large set of endeavours you and your government are implementing.
It is only a person who is intent on dishonestly pretending that nothing is being done who will accuse you of merely planning with no action. Those who are honest know that change is happening every day in a wide range of sectors in South Africa. Those who read, who research, who study context, as ANC cadres have always done, have access to all these initiatives. [Applause.] However, Mr President, as you know very well, there are none who are so blind than those who will not see. Mr President, you have called on all of us to do more for the success and growth of South Africa. All of us, not just the ANC.
Here are some facts which illustrate the importance of your appeal to us all. Because, Mr President, when you speak, you are not just speaking to the ANC, you are speaking to the nation in its entirety; you are speaking to the public sector; you are speaking to the private sector; you are even speaking to the opposition which will often not hear. Mr President, here are the facts which illustrate the challenges we are confronted with. I'm told that South African companies spend over R18 billion a year on overseas licence purchases, on overseas royalties and on using technologies that are imported for their business activities. We need to reduce this R18 billion import of our resources substantially by developing our own in-house technological capabilities; and several of the announcements you have made recently speak to this technological advance.
Your government has already acted in responding to this technological and innovation gap by creating the Technology Innovation Agency, TIA, the national intellectual property management office, Nipmo, and by developing exciting tax incentives for innovation support in industries.
The problem we as South Africans have, Mr President, is that we tend to fear our own products and our own abilities. We doubt ourselves. We need to stop being afraid of our potential for excellence if we are to really prosper as a country. [Applause.] We have a range of policies that will advance innovation and the development of a knowledge economy while also ensuring that we create an inclusive, labour-absorbing and efficient economy as elaborated on in our various policy instruments which are all complementary strategies and not opposites.
There is no doubt that this government is taking up the opportunities presented by the full tide of the transition to a knowledge-based economy with a massive investment and commitment to infrastructure growth, economic diversification, skills development and dedicated attention to our socio- economic challenges. What we need from this House today is members who will join us in this exciting programme of development for the future of our country, because if they do not, they will forever regret the inability to respond to the demands of our time.
We also ask for the PAC to join us in being more modern and to participate in knowing more about our vibrant rural development programmes and land reform initiatives; in understanding what is being done to grow agricultural activities in South Africa; in understanding the new developments in aquaculture, the new development with communities vibrantly exploring agricultural opportunity and growth opportunities in the agricultural commercial sector.
Work, dear colleague Mphahlele, with all South Africans, not some South Africans. So should traditional leaders, as the hon Dr Buthelezi said, be honoured, respected and asked to join this enterprise of development and growth so that they wield their heritage to build strong active developing and democratic communities whose soul is indeed restored, as hon Dr Buthelezi often calls for and reminds us of.
Speaker, Mr President, a firm foundation, I believe, for action has been laid and is present in this room with us today; we should use this foundation to build a better South Africa. If we do not join in this enterprise, we will be committing the fundamental error of many in history who have attempted to say the victims of oppression are the cause of oppression. It can never be accepted that that is something we should hold onto in South Africa and the only way we can overcome the challenges that we are confronted with is through working together to build a better country. The only way we can justify a young man who came to be called Bojang Jo by his parent is by ensuring that we work together to build a better country. Bojang Jo Sebitlo was so named by his mother after his father passed away at the pain of losing their land during the land grabbing era of the 1900s in South Africa. His mother was then expecting a child, she lost her dear husband and when her son was born, she named him Bojang jo, reflecting the protest she had made along with her husband ...
... o ka se ntshutise mo Bojang jo jwa dikgomo tsa ga rre. [... you can't remove me from the land of my father, where my cows graze.]
That is the history of where we come from. That is the history we want to address. The change of not having to name our children with reference to pain, is the change each one of us should welcome and work towards. Thank you.