Speaker, Mr President, all hon members and guests, this is an important debate. Firstly, it gives us an opportunity to express deep gratitude to everyone involved in this triumph for South Africa. I associate myself fully with the President's warm thanks and acknowledgement to so many people, whom I do not have the time to mention, but I would like to fully support that. From the LOC to Bafana Bafana, our team, from every worker and every manager on the construction sites to every volunteer and everyone in between, thank you all for an unparalleled team effort. We made history, and we built our nation.
This is also an opportunity to think about what we learned from hosting the World Cup. We all agree that the tournament was an unparalleled success. The question is: How did we do it? How did we deliver a global event on this scale in record time, when many people still do not have access to basic services after 16 years of democracy? The answer is this: We had an immutable deadline. The world expected the tournament to kick off in Johannesburg at l6:00 on 11 June, and we could not fail. So we did what it took to make it happen.
World Cup deliverables were exempted from normal bureaucratic processes and often dealt with as special cases. All spheres of government aligned their efforts. The best project managers were brought on board, and deviations from time-consuming procedures were often granted. We did this because every other risk paled into insignificance compared to the catastrophe of missing the world's deadline.
The World Cup was a rare case in which all role-players were incentivised to deliver quickly. This incentive is often absent. In fact, government is most often incentivised to deliver slowly because there is a greater risk in not adhering to complex bureaucratic procedures than there is in missing delivery or deadlines. Lawyers always point out the legal pitfalls of not complying with every step of myriad laws and regulations. Politicians and officials comply because taking a short cut is often a greater risk than delivery failure.
This is why, 11 months ago, I met with the President to brief him on the many laws and regulations that make it so difficult to deliver at local level. The President has undertaken to review these laws and bring about changes where necessary. This is greatly encouraging, and we look forward to seeing the outcome.
Of course, we must strike a balance between regulation and delivery. Too much discretion, especially in a context of endemic corruption, is open to abuse. Corruption hampers delivery even more than overregulation does. And it makes a country poorer and poorer.
We must now go beyond talking. We must set immutable deadlines to meet targets in addressing social challenges. If we can learn this lesson from the World Cup and apply it in a way that does not erode our constitutional democracy, it will have been more than worth it.
Understanding how we did what we did is the first lesson. The second is to understand what the World Cup's significance is and how we can replicate it beyond the tournament.
I think that most people would agree with the President when he said that the single greatest achievement of the World Cup was the way it changed stereotyped perceptions of our country and continent. We showed the Afro- pessimists what we can do. We all started to believe in ourselves and that we can be a successful democracy with a growing economy.
How do we keep this momentum going? How can we erase the negative perceptions forever? The good news is that it is all about the choices we make. Let me be quite frank here. In a new book, Why is Africa poor?, Dr Greg Mills concludes that many of our continent's people are poor because their leaders have made policy choices that lead to impoverishment. He says:
... bad choices have been made because better choices in the broad public interest were in very many cases not in the leaders' personal and often financial self-interest.
Tragically, it is not correct to say that we are advancing equity or equality. I agree with Zwelinzima Vavi when he says that South Africa is becoming a predatory state. And the current assault on media freedom - which is being publicised worldwide - is undoing much of what we achieved in the World Cup. We are starting to conform to the negative stereotype once again.
The only way to turn the tide is for our citizens to take responsibility for exercising the power they have in a democracy to effect change. Mills concludes in his book: ... that African leaders were permitted to get away with ruinous, self- interested decisions must be attributed ... to a relative lack of ... bottom-up pressure on leadership to make better choices.
In the final analysis it is our people who decide whether we banish negative perceptions of our country once and for all. They have the power to do it.
It is a very good thing for politicians to fear voters. If we feared Fifa and the risk of missing the world's deadlines, think how much more we could achieve if government and politicians really feared the voters. [Applause.] This is how it should be in a democracy. If we have learnt this lesson from the World Cup, it will be a legacy beyond anything we ever anticipated. Halala, Mzantsi, halala! [Praise to South Africa]. I thank you. [Applause.]