Speaker, Mr President, hon members of the House, on behalf of Cope I also wish to add our appreciation of the fact that the President dedicated this year's state of the nation address to the memory of the release of Mr Nelson Mandela.
Cope pays tribute to Mr Nelson Mandela and all those who worked with him to bring us the wonderful freedom we enjoy. There are very few stories of such exemplary leadership around the world such as we can see with Mr Mandela. He is selfless, disciplined, and he is dignity personified. He is an icon of world peace.
The portrait of Raymond Asquith as drawn by John Buchan applies aptly to Dalibhunga. He says:
Our roll of honour is long but it holds no nobler figure!
When the world honoured Mr Mandela with the Nobel Prize, amongst countless other honours, we became proud. South Africans can stand anywhere in the world and claim as ours his contribution to the triumph of good over evil.
When he ascended to high office, the state of our nation was one full of hope and, as Bantu Biko once said:
We had set out on a quest for true humanity and somewhere in the distant horizon we could see the glittering prize. The glittering prize was that of triumph over hopelessness.
Hon members, the question that we need to ask ourselves is: What is the legacy that Parliament asks us to celebrate through this reflection on the state of the nation?
The legacy can be summed up in a few indicators: South Africa and the ANC gave us a great leader with a sense of honour and a strong moral focus; he raised our eyes to what we can become as a nation; he trusted and respected the law and allowed himself to be tested by the law; he insisted on the separation of state and party powers; he spurned patronage in all its forms; he had depths of compassion for the poor, always treating them with the utmost dignity; and his hallmark was and still is a sense of honour.
Twenty years on, we have not captured that glitter of hope. We have debilitating poverty for millions of our people. In a country with our resource base, it is simply a shame that so many people live below the breadline. We have millions of our children who are unable to read or write owing to an education system in collapse. We are not safe in our own homes owing to the high levels of crime. Indeed, we can defeat these problems, provided that we firstly acknowledge that this is the true state of the nation, and then rally to galvanise the nation to rise to the challenge.
What this nation needs, Mr President, is inspirational yet transformative and action-oriented leadership. In her book, Laying ghosts to rest, Mamphela Ramphele says:
Successful people are those who make and admit mistakes rather than fail to confront their failure. We need to acknowledge where we have fallen short as a nation.
We have to determine to take corrective measures. This is the only way we can triumph over these many challenges - to build a nation that the whole world will watch in admiration even as we host the Fifa World Cup.
South Africans are waiting for the government to invoke our collective sense of honour so that we can rise to overcome, just as we have done in the past, to win against all odds.
I call on the President and his government to listen carefully to the pulse of this nation. Our people are angry at the promises made but not fulfilled. And so Cope asks: Why should South Africans believe you now?
You promised 500 000 jobs or job opportunities. The fact is that almost a million jobs have been lost during the period of the promise. Will the South African people be told what the macro strategy is for reversing the apartheid economy that marginalised the majority of our people from being innovators in the creation of their economic destiny and made the townships and rural areas mere consumers of economic output rather than key drivers of economic innovation?
Small businesses are still waiting with anticipation for the single business registration system that was promised when the President took office. Cope asks: How will South Africans under the leadership of our President transform their parlous economic state that is marked by the growing gap between the rich and the poor?
By the President's own admission, land redistribution - a tool in the hands of his government - will not meet its 2014 target. Many of the farms bought by the government under this scheme have dropped in productivity, if not left as ghost farms threatening the livelihoods of communities. Our food security as a nation is under threat. Why should South Africans believe you now, Mr President?
In response to your previous state of the nation address, you promised that, in order to ensure service delivery and executive accountability, you will make all your Ministers sign performance contracts by the end of July 2009. You have not told us if any Ministers, to date, have signed these contracts.
Instead of acknowledging this glaring gap, you have now further promised us a new outcomes approach that will make 2010 a year of action. Why should South Africans believe this, when your own office, Mr President, according to the Auditor-General's most recent report, has failed to get an unqualified audit, and the man you put in charge of the evaluation of his colleagues goes shopping with a state credit card? [Applause.]
Cope welcomes the ministerial committee to combat corruption. Yet, as late as last week, this committee could not sit due to the unavailability of Ministers.
Mr President, we welcome your emphasis on education and the initiatives you have announced to focus the nation on this priority. Successive ANC governments have promised that no child will study under a tree. The question of infrastructure to allow teachers to do the things highlighted in your speech, has become urgent. What kind of pupils can we produce, when over 79% of our schools don't have libraries and laboratories?
In the week preceding the state of the nation address, another report was released, pointing a finger at the South African Democratic Teachers' Union, SADTU, the teacher union aligned to your government. This report pointed out that they have been out of schools for 42% of all the time that has been lost by the country through industrial action since the dawn of democracy.
Cope calls on the government to declare a state of emergency in education so that teachers may not use innocent children to fight their battles with the state.
Mr President, most of our state hospitals are in a parlous state. We welcome your stated commitment to right this wrong. We also welcome the mooted policy of National Health Insurance, NHI. But South Africans will ask with justification: Why should we believe that, this time ... [Time expired.] [Applause.]