Hon Speaker, Mr President, hon members, ladies and gentlemen, 11 February 1990 marked the day that our President, father of the new South Africa, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela walked from prison en route to becoming the President of the country that he sacrificed so much for. Thank you, Mr President, for recognising the colossal role that uTat' uMadiba played in reconciling our people.
Thank you, for recognising all the other people that you did for the role they played in bringing about reconciliation, peace and democracy. Thank you, also, to those that you did not mention. I know you could not mention all of them, but thank you to Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and the other religious leaders who eventually joined ranks to bring about change. Thank you, Mr President, for your effort at using a nation-building tone, such a tone has been missing from the state of the nation address since the retirement of former President Mandela.
We are all proud and indeed blessed to have had a President who is revered the world over and compared to leaders like Gandhi, Washington, Lincoln, Luther King and Churchill. The South African movie, Invictus, and the book by John Carlin, Playing the Enemy, are indeed a celebration of a leader who has received widespread veneration and been canonised in his own lifetime for his visionary leadership and human dignity.
Former President Mandela displayed exemplary leadership. He had the courage of his convictions. He was a man of iron will who was prepared to take on both friend and foe. He was not averse to or afraid of taking on his own colleagues in the ANC because he never felt beholden to anyone or any faction for his position.
Apart from being personally compromised, Mr President, you appear to owe your allegiance to a certain block within your party's alliance that makes you all the more compromised and vulnerable.
Your state of the nation address left me wondering whether you had indeed read it beforehand, whether you had been set up or whether the people who advise you just did not realise how important it was for you to deliver an extraordinary address for both personal reasons and reasons of national importance. Well, with all due respect, you achieved neither.
The people of our country need to be rallied to roll up their sleeves. They need to hear the presentation of a national vision that they can respond to as a clarion call to nationhood and future prosperity. The nation desperately needs leadership.
The tenuous respect given to you by a deeply suspicious electorate in April 2009 has been systematically eroded. Your trademark song, for example, will never again be sung without invoking a sense of ambiguity.
Laura Miti recently wrote in the Daily Dispatch:
What Zuma and probably the ANC failed to realise is that the new slate that the President was apparently given by the public after his inauguration had conditions similar to those given to an offender serving a suspended sentence. The nation had wanted to put the muck behind it and so gave him a second chance. But after that President Zuma was expected to be on his best behaviour for the rest of his public life. But no, he seemed to think the probation he was put on by the nation after escaping corruption charges on a technicality and after committing a serious sexual indiscretion coupled with making an unbelievably naive statement on HIV and Aids was carte blanche. The crowds after all, still roared his name at rallies across the country - his popularity seemed untouchable.
Well, Mr President, popularity in politics dissipates like this morning's mist.
Mr President, on the day that you paid due respect to former President F W de Klerk and others in the NP leadership and service related echelons for crossing the proverbial Rubicon and for having the foresight and courage to take bold decisions, your chief cheerleader harangued former President De Klerk and treated him with contemptible disrespect. The fact that neither you nor anyone in the ANC leadership have not publicly rebuked him for this or any other examples of his oafish behaviour is a matter of lamentable concern.
As surely as former President Mandela was quoted as saying, "Posterity will prove I was innocent", will posterity prove that you and the other ANC leaders are in dereliction of your duty in this regard.
Your first year in office has hardly been stellar and your call for 2010 to be a year of action really rings hollow in our ears. Why?, because we have heard all these exhortations before. Remember these: "the age of hope", "business unusual", "all hands on deck", "working together we can do more" and "faster, harder, smarter"?
Why should 2010 be the year of action more than 2008 or 2009? The ANC is wasting precious time with all these empty slogans. Who really believes that the ANC government will provide anything "faster, harder, and smarter"?
Speaking of wasted time, author and political activist Paul Trewhela - I am sure you know him - in his book, Inside Quatro, speaks candidly about the balance sheet of 15 wasted years under the guidance of the ANC as the unchallenged party of government. Regarding this he says:
No party ever came to government with such an overwhelming mandate from the people and with such immense goodwill internationally. Few dissipated that trust so convincingly.
Trewhela singles out education as the greatest failure. He believes, and we concur, that the ANC should have seized on this from the outset and told the whole nation -
We have limited resources, and there are great compelling needs, but this above all - with dedication, good sense and common effort - can rise up and prepare for the future a new generation that will be better fitted to solve the country's problems than ourselves.
We all know about the state of education in our country and no one knows better than the parents who aspire for their children to have a better education than they had had. Trewhela says:
Instead, the materialistic scramble for personal wealth, at any price, the rancour, the power play, the strutting about of great men and some women, the arrogance of office, the delusions, the false gods, style, instead of substance, 15 wasted years.
Mr President, your exhortation to teachers to be in the classroom seven hours a day was actually already made last year. This rhetorical appeal had no impact on the matric results. You will have to tackle the role of education unions and teachers regarding underperformance in this crucial field. Again, political will and exemplary leadership from you and all leaders involved will be definitive. Mr President, you rightly spend vast sums of money going to Davos, to court financial friends and to attract foreign investment, but you continue to ignore pressing priorities within your government. You ignore the Auditor- General's assertion of a almost total breakdown of financial management.
In the Eastern Cape, for example, the department of health overspent its budget by R1,8 billion, with no discernable difference in service delivery! What happened then was that creditors were not paid and that resulted in the closure of SMMEs and their subsequent sequestration, with the result being the catastrophic consequence of job losses.
When will you invest in putting competent people into key posts, and when will you begin ensuring that scarce resources are efficiently, effectively and economically spent? It appears not in the near or foreseeable future, as you and Mr Mantashe have stated that your failed and unlawful policy of cadre deployment will continue. In fact, you say that cadre deployment will be more objective and transparent. This is the ultimate oxymoron.
Recent court rulings in this regard, in fact, have found mostly in favour of applicants who have been prejudiced by cadre deployment. The case of Dr Vuyo Mlokoti against the Amathole District Municipality and Adv Zenzile is a case in point. Speaking of East London or Buffalo City, Mr President, you must know that as the next city to be upgraded to a metropolis, this city is now referred to as "Buffalo Circus".
The ANC provincial leadership is now putting it under administration and all I can say is, heaven help Buffalo City. This is because the following municipalities have been put under administration in the Eastern Cape: Mnquma Municipality, King Sabata Dalindyebo Municipality, Great Kei Municipality, Koukamma Municipality and Sunday's River Valley Local Municipality. And nothing has changed in those municipalities because the problem is caused by intractable infighting in the ANC. It is a political disgrace and nothing else. [Applause.]
The recent firing of mayors in Mpumalanga and other provinces across the country is not a genuine endeavour to turn around the crisis in service delivery; it is merely a changing of the political guard.
Mr President, your declaration that you will conclude performance contracts with your Ministers with measurable outcomes being the criteria for monitoring their individual performance is refreshing. This, of course, is not as innovative as you make out and should, in fact, have been in place in Cabinet since 1994.
It will also require political will and you will have to personally support and back Minister Chabane to the hilt. If you can't or won't, the contracts will be worth as much as the Public Finance Management Act is in our Public Service corps.
That Act has been in place for 10 years - one of the best pieces of legislation in this country, but the most ignored. The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions.
Equally, Mr President, your corruption commission comprised of the very Ministers under whose watch corruption flourishes, will be stillborn if there is no real political will and exemplary leadership.
In Kenya, after Mwai Kibaki replaced the notoriously corrupt Daniel Arap Moi, he promised an end to corruption. He appointed John Githongo as the Anticorruption Minister. Michela Wrong, in her book It's Our Turn to Eat, exposes how the consequences of Githongo's efforts that were tantamount to mucking out the Aegean stables led to him being hounded out of the country of his birth, because he uncovered more and more self-service, self- enrichment and sleaze amongst his own colleagues. This ultimately placed his very life at risk.
Kuza kufuneka ugade Mhlekazi obekekileyo uChabane, ngoba xa uza kufuna ukubetha amaqabane, aza kufuna ukubetha wena. (Translation of isiXhosa paragraph follows.)
[You must be on guard hon Chabane, for if you want to punish the comrades, they will in turn want revenge.]
Githongo said, at the time that -
Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation and power. Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.
South Africa needs exemplary leadership, not fear, or entitlement, from its leaders. It is not your turn to eat.
Blind allegiance to ANC leaders and slavish behaviour of deployed cadres putting the party first is a recipe for the disaster we are experiencing at local government level. It compromises discipline and commitment amongst public servants, because cadre deployment beneficiaries are actually held to ransom similar to the thinly veiled threat by Michael Corleone in The Godfather, when he said:
You're my older brother and I love you, but don't ever take sides against the family again.
On presidential pardons, allow me to advise that you resist the temptation to abuse your position of power to pardon your friends. Beware, also, of taking the nation's intellect for granted. You cannot use the pardon of one person as a smokescreen for the pardon of another. Pardons should be considered only in cases where there has been a travesty of justice. This is not evident on first principle in the cases of Shabir Schaik and Eugene de Kock.
Pardons undermine the rule of law and the principle of equality before the law, which you, sir, incidentally, are responsible for upholding.
When you compromise yourself and the rule of law, you accelerate the slide to a failed state. Zimbabwe is a shameful example of this regression. It has become evident that despite your outspokenness about Zimbabwe before your election, you have succumbed to your party's policy of silent diplomacy, because you cannot bring yourselves to act against Mugabe and bring his tenure of terror to an end.
I recommend that you read the DA's road map to peace and democracy and implement its recommendations.