Hon Speaker, bereaved son and daughter of Mama Sisulu, the DA conveys it's deepest condolences on your loss.
Mr Speaker, hon President, this is an extract from Max du Preez's column entitled Pale Native.
Counterintuitivity is what made our country's greatest leaders great. The ability to think beyond the obvious; the vision to recognise that what appears to be a logical solution could actually exacerbate the problem, and the courage to push for better outcomes. It is not a fanciful post- modern Western construct. We have some of the best examples of counter- intuitivity right here in Africa: King Moshoeshoe, who was born in 1787, formulated his own political philosophies before he ever met a European.
Du Preez goes on to illustrate how counterintuitivity has served our country's best leaders, not least of all Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. He describes how Professor Njabulo Ndebele explained this quality in President Mandela:
The characteristic feature of this type of leadership is the ability of a leader to read a situation whose most observable logic points to a most likely outcome, but then to detect in that very likely outcome not a solution but a compounding of the problem.
This assessment then calls for the prescription of an unexpected outcome, which initially may look strikingly improbable. A leader then has to sell the unexpected because he has to overcome intuitive doubts and suspicions that will have been expected. The blockbuster South African movie Invictus illustrates this characteristic perfectly.
Mr President, you are faced with many challenges as the head of state. These include not least the internal dynamics in your political party, which play themselves out in the most bizarre kind of Saint Vitus dance, but also, more importantly, the challenges so candidly enumerated in the Diagnostic Overview of the National Planning Commission, NPC. These include challenges such as unemployment, poor-quality education and health care and insufficient infrastructure. Three key areas of concern highlighted by the NPC that I wish to discuss today are the uneven performance of the Public Service, the role of corruption in undermining state legitimacy and service delivery, and divisions within South African society.
Of course, you would or should know all of this, but now it has been identified after 13 months of intensive investigation by the NPC and its commissioners; a task undertaken at vast cost, with the NPC being allocated almost R84 million this year.
You will also know these challenges after your door-to-door campaigning during the election, because you told the Sunday Times that this campaign had exposed an ugly side of South Africa that government officials did not mention in their service delivery reports. You mentioned too the chaos in education in the Eastern Cape, which is so chilling. Mr President, this is precisely why in April last year I called for the establishment of an oversight portfolio committee to oversee The Presidency and the two ministries that fall under its authority.
In September 2009 at the Annual Association of Public Accounts Committees conference, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said:
The Constitution prescribed that members of the executive are collectively and individually accountable and must regularly provide comprehensive reports regarding matters related to the performance of functions under their control.
This means that The Presidency, like the nine offices of the provincial premiers, must be overseen by a legislative authority. We are today debating the passing of a budget for The Presidency and I cannot responsibly agree to this if I had no opportunity to scrutinise its operations and outcomes in regard to its previous year's Budget and strategic plans. This is further compounded by the fact that the Department of Monitoring and Evaluation, which was under the direct authority of The Presidency, could not give you an idea of what you encountered personally when you said you had seen the coalface of service delivery and the reports you received from officials sometimes might not give the same feeling that you get when you come into contact with the real conditions people live in.
We in this Parliament represent these people and the real conditions they live in. This is why we have a constitutional and parliamentary obligation to perform oversight over government and to hold it to account, your department included. The acclaimed author of many books on Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin, says the following about democracy and accountability:
Democracy is not something that only happens when you go and vote and that is it. It has to be guarded with jealousy all the time and it is guarded by people participating in it and by being well informed and by reading about it and holding politicians accountable. Democracy has to be policed by its citizens.
The 400 Members of this Parliament are the representatives of the citizenry and we have a constitutional and moral obligation to oversee the executive and hold it to account. We do this to the best of our ability in regard to all government departments - and we know there are many - with the exception of The Presidency. This must change. As the body at the apex of government, The Presidency should set an example in this regard.
Regarding being an example, I want to place on record some of the issues that were discussed with you at the last meeting you held with political party leaders. Firstly, the participation of other political parties at national events organised by the State has been placed in jeopardy by the behaviour of the supporters of the governing party. Your claim that you believed that the efforts by Minister Mashatile at the last Freedom Day celebrations were adequate is simply not acceptable, especially as you yourself were present and all that you needed to do was to intervene and explain why it is so important to have all political parties present at such events.
The second issue is much more uncomfortable, and that is the seriously divisive and incendiary utterances made by senior government executives, including, but not exclusively, yourself and Minister Nzimande, not to mention the leader of the ANC Youth League, whom you forever tell us to engage in debate even though he is not a Member of Parliament and when national TV organises a debate, he throws his proverbial toys out of the cot and refuses to engage.
Mr President, we are not a secular state and your exhortation to voters that a vote for the ANC is a guarantee to enter heaven and that one for the opposition is a guarantee to eternal damnation in hell is unacceptable.
Asifuni, Mongameli, ukuphila ubomi obungcono ezulwini; sibufuna apha emhlabeni. [President, we don't want to live a better life in heaven. We want it here on earth.]
Furthermore, conjuring up the wrath of the ancestors is reminiscent of similar exhortations that led to genocide and ethnic cleansing in other African countries. We cannot afford this type of rhetoric - not now, not ever! This is what keeps South Africa a divided nation.
Speaking of rhetoric, let this House note that as I speak today, there has been no formal repudiation nor sanction against the Nelson Mandela Metro Regional Chairperson of the ANC and former Mayor, Nceba Faku. This crazed individual called for the burning down of the Eastern Province newspaper, the Herald, and for all black people who voted for opposition parties to be driven into the sea. This deranged kind of rhetoric served as a thinly veiled veneer of self-preservation, as it was the Herald newspaper that was reporting on the finding of the buried Kabuso report, which apparently fingers Mr Faku in multiple instances of corruption and self-enrichment. I have written to the provincial chairman of the ANC, the Premier of the Eastern Cape and the Human Rights Commission in this regard. To date, only the Human Rights Commission has even had the courtesy to reply and has said that it will now consider the complaint and decide whether it warrants an investigation.
The ANC in the Eastern Cape, through Mlibo Qoboshiyane, initially undertook to have Faku withdraw his insane utterances, which were not ANC policy, and to apologise. However, this never happened. Instead Qoboshiyane had a volte- face and stated that the ANC provincial leadership "had accepted Faku's explanation that he never made a call for any form of violence against the Herald". Mr President, is the call to burn down a newspaper not a violent act or exhortation? Mr President, it is. You need to see to it that this man is held to account for his behaviour, especially as this incident occurred the day after we had all accepted the election results as the will of the people at the provincial election result centre. Imagine what Faku would have said and done if the ANC had actually lost the Nelson Mandela Metro. The mind boggles.
Max du Preez believes:
Counterintuitivity is the one quality completely absent in political leadership in South Africa today. The uncontrolled, cheap populism that has overwhelmed the ANC since Polokwane in December 2007 and the vicious infighting and power struggles inside the party makes any such possibility virtually impossible.
He says, and I agree:
We stumble from one crisis to the next and the only constant is that the political elite and their cronies look after themselves. There is no vision, no thoughtful and courageous leadership. God help us.
The DA cannot support this budget as we do not know what it is being used for and we have seen nothing to date that inspires us to believe that the budget is being effectively utilised to address the Diagnostic Overview of the NPC. I thank you. [Applause.]