Hon Speaker, Xhamela, the hon His Excellency the President, Msholozi, hon Deputy President, Mkhuluwa, hon Ministers of state, hon Deputy Ministers, hon Leader of the Opposition, hon leaders of political parties, hon Members of Parliament, I address the head of state and all of us in this way because I am asking that today we should be introspective as a nation. As I point out certain things, I am pointing out facts of the matter. I am not trying to apportion blame for the sake of apportioning blame.
From this podium I have said before that the failure of government is the failure of South Africa, and the failure of all of us. What I have to say today, I say for the love of my country. When I speak, I do so to be constructive.
Mr President, we have heard your speech, your hopes and your plans, and we desire nothing more than to be able to have confidence in them. Yet, too much prevents us from doing so. How can we embrace hope when our leadership refuses to acknowledge the many problems confronting our country or the causes that lie at their roots? Year after year the state of the nation address shifts focus, without ever addressing previous failures.
Your Excellency, in this debate we must analyse all that you said last Thursday. But, increasingly, I feel that the measure of your leadership can be taken less by what you say than by what you do not say. Understandably, the state of the nation address will touch on the high notes of government, leaving much unsaid. But this year we have been left with the impression that our attention is being redirected away from the elephant in the room. There is a danger in that, for elephants can be unpredictable and extremely destructive.
It is therefore good and well - through you, Mr Speaker, to His Excellency - to say that our government is working with various provinces to improve governance, systems and administration. But the unspoken fact remains that two of our nine provinces have all but collapsed. Limpopo has been rendered bankrupt through corrupt activities and five of its departments have been taken over by national government. And when you, Your Excellency, and your government do the right thing by intervening, even members of your government say that you are doing that for political reasons. The administration of the state is in shambles.
It is fine to say that we are doing well with regard to the treatment of HIV and Aids. But the unspoken fact remains that South Africa has lost some 5 million people to HIV and Aids because of our slow and hesitant response to the pandemic.
One can say that we are expanding access to tertiary education by assisting students - which is plausible - to pay off their debts. But the unspoken fact remains that students are so desperate to secure admission that they are stampeding universities, causing injury and loss of life. For instance, a parent this year in Johannesburg lost her life as a result of a stampede.
In the Eastern Cape, the education system has completely collapsed due to maladministration and corruption, forcing our national government to intervene.
It is fine, Your Excellency, to say we will improve the movement of goods through a Durban-Free State-Gauteng logistics and industrial corridor. But the unspoken fact is that the KwaZulu-Natal department of transport has had to halt all major road infrastructure projects, while Durban has notched up R1,3 billion in bad spending. The Free State has sought assistance from National Treasury after identifying financial mismanagement and noncompliance in supply-chain management processes in its department of police, roads and transport.
Gauteng has also sought assistance from National Treasury to address the challenges in its health department, which is on the verge of collapse. It faces 101 legal claims, amounting to R235 million, owing to negligence. The IFP in Gauteng called for an urgent commission of inquiry to investigate this debacle because we, like every South African, want to know why this is happening, Mr President.
Twenty years ago there were many people in this country who felt that we black people were not capable enough to rule a country and administer a democratic government. That was one of the major fears during the negotiation process. That is why some people went to Perth. Some people felt that it was in the DNA of us Africans to be inefficient, inept and corrupt. I refuse to believe that.
Yet how do we explain the many nurses in our public hospitals who just do not feel the inner duty to respond to the needs of suffering patients? And what are we to say about teachers who do not feel the calling to spare energy and to double their dedication to teach our children so that, through better education, they may finally be emancipated from all that oppressed my generation and your generation, Your Excellency?
If the call of duty is not felt in these two fields, it should be no wonder that throughout the Public Service productivity and commitment are so low that they translate into poor delivery. What has disrupted the moral fibre and discipline of our people? What has happened? We know the answer, but we refuse to acknowledge it.
How, Mr President, do we explain the contamination of Public Service and commercial interests? It is fatal, and yet it is pursued relentlessly, from the lowest to the highest levels of government. Too many - and I dare say, the overwhelming majority - are trying to make money on account of holding public office, being in politics or exercising public power.
Corruption is the bane of our country, Your Excellency. It is a fundamental threat to our constitutional democracy. As former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Kofi Annan, said:
Corruption hurts the poor disproportionately by diverting funds intended for development, undermining a government's ability to provide basic services, feeding inequality and injustice and discouraging foreign aid and investment. Corruption is a key element in economic underperformance and a major obstacle to poverty alleviation and development. Yet, sir, you shy away from this issue. The unspoken fact is that corruption has seen the axing by you, sir, of two of your Ministers, Mr Sicelo Shiceka and Ms Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde, for which we all applauded your decisiveness. The National Police Commissioner, Mr Bheki Cele, is still suspended pending an investigation into corruption. His predecessor is in jail. The Speaker of the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature, Ms Peggy Nkonyeni, and MEC Mr Mike Mabuyakhulu are facing corruption charges in court. The head of Treasury in KwaZulu-Natal is facing charges of corruption in court.
Remember, Your Excellency, that you took over the department of economic affairs, which I ran in the erstwhile KwaZulu government. You will also remember that I founded a bank there called Ithala Bank and you would remember that after you left, it was pillaged by MECs who gave loans to their wives to buy you farms. [Interjections.]
The recently released Manase report uncovers widespread and rampant corruption within eThekwini Municipality. High-ranking eThekwini municipal officials and politicians, including the former municipal manager Mr Mike Sutcliffe, and former mayor Mr Obed Mlaba, have been fingered in a damning forensic investigation into financial irregularities, fraud and corruption.
Last year, the former head of the Special Investigating Unit, Mr Willie Hofmeyr, told the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Justice and Constitutional Development that 20% of South Africa's procurement budget, between R25 billion and R30 billion, is lost to corruption every year. According to Transparency International's 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, South Africa is perceived to be becoming more corrupt with each passing year. That perception is rooted in reality. On a scale of 0 being highly corrupt, to 10 being very clean, we have fallen from a ranking of 5,1 in 2007 to 4,1 in 2011. The unspoken fact is that we are on the verge of joining the ranks of dysfunctional states, as the effects of corruption debilitate all spheres of life.
Mr President, during the weekend I saw this cartoon and I thought it summarised what I am trying to say, with all these pigs running for the trough. I hope that Hansard will print it as part of my speech. [Laughter.]
Then I ask the question, Your Excellency Mr President, how do we fix this? Surely not with more rhetoric, empty words and never-ending declarations of policy? I think we must have the courage to go to the root cause because it was you, Your Excellency, who on 30 December 2000, acting as chairperson of a committee of the South African government, signed a formal agreement with traditional leaders in terms of which the local government powers and functions of traditional authorities would be preserved. This was actually a promise which had been made before by then President Mbeki that there would be no obliteration of the powers and functions of traditional leaders and, if they were obliterated, you promised to make amendments. In terms of that agreement, it was agreed that chapters 7 and 12 of the Constitution would be amended.
It was you, Your Excellency, who did not bring that agreement to Cabinet for ratification, and it is you, sir, who bears the final responsibility for it having been breached and for the powers, functions, respectability, moral authority and social guidance of traditional leadership having finally been obliterated.
The question can be asked: What does this have to do with corruption? It is relevant because the core problem of maladministration, inefficiency and corruption is the disintegration of social cohesiveness, social values, rectitude, integrity, discipline and dedication to duty, which traditional leadership has been entrusted to promote and inculcate within our communities. Once that disintegrates, as it unfortunately has, what ends up in our government offices, hospitals and schools bears the hallmark of no one willing to pay a personal price to make this country a better place.
It was you, Your Excellency, who was charged by President Mbeki to champion and pilot the campaign for the moral regeneration of South Africa. I need not comment on that.
It was also you, Your Excellency, who was equally charged by President Mbeki to bring about the reform of our labour legislation to increase the flexibility in the labour market. That, too, ended in nought.
Why is that relevant, the question may be asked? It is relevant because our labour legislation and the lack of flexibility in our labour market have not only been identified by your government, sir - even when I was in government - as one of the major impediments to real economic growth and real employment generation, but also as a cause of the ongoing degeneration of a sense of duty and commitment in the workplace. Empowering trade unions the way you have been instrumental in doing, Mr President, has eroded the culture of hard work, discipline, productivity, dignity and self-respect which people like me have promoted and instilled in our communities for more than 60 years. This has compounded problems with problems.
It was your party, sir, which for 20 years made it its main political policy in South Africa to undermine social cohesion within our communities. Your party embraced and promoted the strategy of making our communities ungovernable - even townships ungovernable - spreading a culture of lawlessness and rebellion and destroying the black education system. The black education system was far from perfect, but its destruction replaced it with the roots of a phenomenon which is the common denominator of most of our problems. It brings together our irresponsible nurses, our indolent teachers, our ineffective public servants and all the youth with narrow- minded vision, distorted values and the wrong hopes, who were falsely lured into supporting the president of the youth league of your party, who said that I was an ANC factory fault. [Laughter.]
Mr President, everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. Every government has faults and shortcomings. None of us is perfect. The wise acknowledge that and correct them, but the unwise ignore them.
You correctly identify our sky-rocketing electricity prices as one of the factors which are thwarting all our efforts to develop an industrial basis and produce real growth in our economy. Yet we did tell you that funding the build programme of Eskom through tariffs was a mistake. We did tell you, Your Excellency, that it should have been funded by means of an international competition which would have brought into South Africa as much as R400 billion of direct foreign investment, while creating a much- needed and healthy competition amongst producers and distributors of electricity. We were ignored.
We said further that, if funded domestically, the build programme had to be funded through the national budget and not through tariffs, so that the rich would pay more than the poor. The way it has been done is to force industries and the productive middle class to bear a much greater burden for the investments than warranted by their actual taxable income. I am just giving this example as part of the same problem. That is the problem of doing things for the wrong reasons, including political reasons, and not for commitment to our country's and our people's best interests. I will add two more examples, because the magnitude of the mistakes there shows what happens when political thinking overrides national interest.
Under your leadership, Mr President, our country jumped into the Brics, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, group. Yet, to develop an industrial basis, we must manufacture export products which, in the final analysis, can mainly only be sold outside of the Brics countries and mainly in the regions which have been our traditional trade partners, namely Europe and North America. This shows how our priorities become confused and contradictory. Our priorities should be to ensure that the African Growth and Opportunity Act of the United States is renewed and expanded so that we can export our products there without duties and quotas, and that similar agreements are entered into with other markets where we can sell our products.
Another major policy mistake is maintaining the four retail bank policies and tolerating the collusion and other constraints of trade openly practised by our banks. Because of the lack of real competition, our banks are not forced to take risks they don't want to take, but force all the risky business onto the Industrial Development Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa. This means that they choose to live only by the business which makes money with no risk, and the government, the taxpayers and our communities must bear the risk associated with promoting economic growth. It would seem as if your government, Your Excellency, has a greater commitment to serving the banks than the people we represent.
Mr President, you praise the trade unions and Sadtu as if they should be thanked for doing less than the full measure of their destructive capabilities. Praising the South African Democratic Teachers Union on Thursday for its diligent teachers was a step too far, I thought, Mr President, in placating the unions. [Applause.]
The members of Sadtu often abandon students nationwide to drive their own agendas. The ANC-aligned union continues to act like an organisation hellbent on destroying the future of our children. Sadtu should be rebuked, in fact, and not praised for their actions. [Applause.] Their actions have aggravated and deepened the crisis in our education system. Instead of acting like responsible educators, some members of Sadtu have, on numerous occasions, proven themselves irresponsible, unprofessional and unfit to educate South Africa's learners. The recent go-slow in the Eastern Cape, where education came to a complete halt, is a case in point.
Mr President, you mentioned that employment generation never recovered from the terrible knockout it received at the end of the seventies, but you failed to explain why that happened. You do not wish to remember that employment generation collapsed because of the call for sanctions against our country and for foreign disinvestment, which your party, Mr President, foisted onto South Africa and which I so vehemently opposed.
This was because nothing destroys economic growth more than sanctions. Strangely, your government and the ruling party, the ANC, have adopted the correct policy against sanctions being imposed on Zimbabwe for the same reasons, namely that they destroy the lives of the poorest of the poor.
History has proven me right and your party wrong. You admit that we have yet to recover from that self-inflicted injury, the same way that we have yet to recover from the self-inflicted injury of having disrupted the moral fibre and discipline of our communities.
But too much remains unsaid, sir. You make no mention of small businesses and how they will be assisted by government to help grow the economy and create jobs. You make no mention of the fact that the two sectors that should be booming right now owing to international demand, namely agriculture and mining, are in reverse, owing to government's many policy failures.
The unspoken fact is that the latest global competitiveness rankings of the World Economic Forum highlight how corruption, wasteful expenditure and government red tape are increasingly hindering business development, SMMEs and investment in our country. I want to have hope in our future. No one can fault what you have said. But how do you know that every cent of that money will be used to do what you said it should do, with this corruption? I want to have confidence in you, Mr President. I want to be able to believe that there is more than just words to your declaration of intent. But how much of what has been set aside by the state to achieve such lofty goals will actually fulfil its intended purpose? We know that when resources are made available, corrupt officials are already salivating. [Laughter.] One is completely galled by the conspicuous consumption of state resources by these people.
I fear there is a disconnect between government and the reality of everyday life for South Africans. It is impossible to have hope while the ANC refuses to recognise, acknowledge and mend the error of its ways. We must start by correcting the terrible injuries inflicted by ourselves, not by apartheid, not by the colonialists, not by foreign powers, but by ourselves, on the minds, strength and discipline of our own people.
We need to rebuild pride in our work. We need to build a sense of dignity in abiding by the discipline necessary to improve our conditions. We need to terminate the culture of dependency. We need to create a culture of real growth, which must range from what young people do to build their futures to how our enterprises understand that they have to compete and survive without relying on government crutches.
We need to re-establish the important role of traditional leadership throughout the country. We need to exact from each public servant the full measure of dedication that one would expect from a soldier in a war in which we are engaged for progress and development.
We must have a complete separation between public office and commercial venture and completely change our mindset in this respect. And, most of all, we must fire all those who do not comply with these imperatives, ranging from lazy public servants to corrupt officials, to nurses who do not nurse and teachers who do not teach. If we fail to attend to this basic aspect of our country's reconstruction and development, everything else is bound not to achieve its intended purpose.
Mr President, your address was good, but it lacked accountability on the crisis in health, the crisis in education and the crisis of corruption. What you said looks good on paper. But what you have not said can, in fact, prevent the fulfilment of the best-laid plans. I wonder where my brother the hon Andrew Mlangeni is. We both did matric in 1947. Do you remember that poem by Robert Burns "To a Mouse"?
But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!
Still you are blest, compared with me! The present only touches you: But oh! I backward cast my eye, On prospects dreary! And forward, though I cannot see, I guess and fear!
Msholozi. [Applause.]