Deputy Chairperson, hon members of the NCOP, our hon Premiers of the Northern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal present, as elected representatives of the people of the Northern Cape, we are mandated to implement policies and programmes that would lead to the overall improvement in the quality of the lives of our people.
Working together with our people, with the private sector and civil society organisations, we need to ensure that the economy grows at a higher rate, that the economy creates new jobs and continues to develop into a modern and internationally competitive economy.
The premier and the executive council, through the office of the premier, are ultimately responsible for ensuring that provincial government delivers on these priorities in a co-ordinated, integrated, effective and efficient manner.
This requires effective communication with the ordinary people of our province. It requires integration and co-ordination of our policies and programmes across all spheres of government, ensuring simultaneously that all vulnerable groups and their interests are adequately mainstreamed and addressed and that the spread of tuberculosis, HIV and Aids and sexually transmitted infections is contained more effectively.
I can proudly report that we are tackling these challenges with a sense of urgency to ensure that our programmes have a maximum and positive impact on the lives of the ordinary poor people of the province. Most of our programmes are in fact currently geared towards the most vulnerable sector of our society and that is the poor people living with disabilities, women, children and the elderly. I must emphasise that the Northern Cape government is a government that is people-centred and people-driven.
Our provincial government, through the Taking Parliament to the People programme, travelled the length and breadth of our province to engage directly with the communities that it serves and respond to the problems and challenges that they raise.
This programme has promoted a dynamic engagement between government and its constituencies. It has undoubtedly offered the communities a voice to instruct government about the service delivery areas in the remotest areas of the Northern Cape, thereby advancing with speed a key principle of this democratic government, which is to make inroads in the area of rural development.
The Northern Cape has, through the Expanded Public Works Programme, engaged in intensified labour methods to involve our people in the construction of roads and housing. This has created a number of job opportunities for our people and has simultaneously transferred much-needed skills to ordinary people.
We are thereby committed to ensure that cohesive, caring and sustainable communities are brought to the fore. Through the integrated development strategy, we are making sure the people have access to all the basic amenities such as decent housing, roads, electricity, shopping areas and places of worship. We have prioritised areas in the African working-class township such as Lerato Park in Kimberley and Ou Boks in Colesberg.
The province has intensified the fight against crime and corruption and we are determined to root out all the criminal elements in our society and create a safe and protected environment for our people to live in. We are pleased to report that our campaign around HIV and Aids testing and counselling has progressed very well. Many people in the Northern Cape have volunteered to be tested and know their status to ensure that government is able to provide better preventative and treatment methodologies.
Local government is another important sphere of government that is nearest to our people. We have instituted a local government turnaround strategy to strengthen the financial management, administrative capacity and also to improve the customer ethos of our local public servants.
On the educational front, we will continue to provide assistance and support school principals, particularly in those underperforming schools. We are committed to increasingly provide training to our teachers with a particular focus on mathematics and science. Through the premier's bursary fund, we are consistent in our endeavour to offer bursaries to indigent students, therewith expanding the learner opportunities for our disadvantaged children. We are committed to produce the necessary skills and expertise that are relevant to the success and economic development of the Northern Cape province.
Despite the significant progress that we have made as a province to provide basic services to our people, a lot more still needs to be done. We need to create more job opportunities for our people to address the high levels of unemployment. This unemployment constitutes the single most significant threat to the democratic society which we want to build. This has worsened in the Northern Cape province, given the fact that over the last two decades our formal economy and primary sector in the province, that is mining, has been shedding jobs and many of our people and workers have been retrenched.
Our Balelapa Antipoverty Household Profiling project, which aims to profile all the poor households in the province with a view to provide a rapid expanded social package and assistance, is geared towards making sure that government responds faster and more appropriately to the grievances of the ordinary people in our province. We are committed to halve poverty by 2014 in the Northern Cape province through this programme of Balelapa.
All in all, as the provincial government of the Northern Cape, we are progressing fairly well in our ongoing engagements with the masses of our people. We see great meaning in this interaction and will pursue this even with a greater vigour in the year ahead, in order to build a new society, premised on the humane concept of building a national democratic society. Public participation in the affairs of government is critical in order to ensure that government listens and takes up issues raised by our ordinary people.
In the Northern Cape province of South Africa and in accordance with the precepts of the Freedom Charter adopted on 26 June 1955, "the people indeed are governing". Thank you. [Applause.]