Hon Speaker and members of this House, today, 25 May, we celebrate Africa Day as Africans proud of our "Africanness". Our neighbours, Kenya and Tanzania, and all other African countries will be marking this day with a public holiday. In this regard, South Africa must follow what the rest of Africa is doing, by proclaiming this day as a public holiday. We certainly need to realign our public holidays so that the significance of this day is not lost on generations to come.
Today we are gathered here to reflect on the dream of those iconic leaders who got together to form the Organisation of African Unity to ensure that all Africans enjoy human rights, to raise the living standards of Africans, and to achieve unity and solidarity among African people. We have made some progress, but in general we have slipped back.
Former South African President Mbeki, in his quest to preserve the legacy of the founding fathers of this day, saw an opportunity to remind the nations of this, with the African Renaissance, the African century and the New Partnership for Africa's Development, Nepad. He was committed to seeing that we were not only connected to Africa, but that we were actively asserting our "Africanness" in the global scheme of things.
Africa becomes an important global player. President Mbeki had a vision of Africa working as a united continent to reverse the impact of colonialism and to give Africans a sense of pride in the achievements of this continent. This is why South Africa and Mali entered into a partnership to create a library to preserve more than 200 000 Arabic and West African manuscripts dating from the 13th century to the 19th century. This became the first official cultural project of Nepad. When President Mbeki was recalled after the Polokwane conference, this dream of a united Africa began to disintegrate with his departure; hence the president of Algeria's comment that South Africa must revive Nepad.
Africa, at the present moment, does not seem to have charismatic and intellectual leaders to inspire Africans to greatness. To the north of us, dictators are being overthrown and even as we are debating here, Egyptian authorities are preparing to bring Hosni Mubarak to trial for murder. Closer to us, in Zimbabwe, the search for political freedom and political stability remains a distant dream. Ugandan President Museveni is slowly becoming a dictator. Very soon, he is going to be no different from Idi Amin, because he is suppressing the voice of the opposition in his own country.
As a result of a lack of high-quality leadership, Africa remains underdeveloped and impoverished. Yet Africa is not poor. Researchers have established that the African continent has 50% of the world's gold, 90% of its cobalt, 65% of its manganese, and most of the world's diamonds and chromium. Our continent is rich in these and numerous other commodities, and yet we are underindustrialised!
At the same time, our universities do not produce the number of PhDs that the knowledge economy of today requires. Governments in Africa, like the ANC government in South Africa, do not understand the importance and significance of the free flow of information. At this critical moment in our history, the ANC is ploughing ahead with its Protection of Information Bill, which will take us back to the apartheid era! [Interjections.] Those who still vote for the ANC, and that number is declining, should be asking themselves where the ANC is taking us with this regressive proposal. [Interjections.]