Thank you very much, hon President, for your encouraging speech.
Angithathe lelithuba ngibonge uSihlalo, ngibonga kakhulu kuMongameli wezwe lakithi elithandeka kakhulu izwe laseNingizimu Afrika. Ngibonge kakhulu koNdunankulu bonke bezifundazwe abakhona namhlanje kule nkulumo kaMongameli wethu. Ngibonge labo abamele uSalga, abakhona namhlanje kule ndlu yethu.
Ngibonge zonke izithunywa ezikhethekile ezizile lapha namhlanje. Ngiphinde ke ngibonge nabavela kuleliya lase-Nigeria ukuba bazohlanganyela kanye nathi, sifundisane ukuthi kufanele sisebenzisane kanjani singamaPhalamende ezwekazi lethu lase-Afrika esilithandayo. (Translation of isiZulu paragraphs follows.)
[Let me take this opportunity to thank the Chairperson. I am also very thankful to the President of our beloved country, South Africa. I also thank all the premiers who are here today for our President's speech. I am thankful to all the Salga representatives who are here in this House today.
I want to thank all the distinguished guests who are here today. And I also want to thank those who have come from Nigeria, who are here with us today, in a bid to educate each other on how to function as parliaments of our beloved African continent.]
I wish to thank President Zuma for gracing this House with his message under the theme, "Together finding solutions to achieving the goal of a better quality of life for all".
We know, hon members, that our country is still facing a number of challenges, but there is new hope under your leadership, Mr President, as we have already seen in the short time since you have taken up your job as President. [Applause.]
Since the establishment of the NCOP, we have looked at the issues that the provinces and organised local government want us to focus on during this term of Parliament. Informed by the 10 strategy priorities, which were announced during the President's state of the nation address, we convened the representatives of our provincial legislatures and organised local government to deliberate on the way forward.
The outcome was a draft of the strategic framework plan to be finalised by this House very shortly; and I just quickly want to go through the objectives of this strategic framework:
To promote provincial interests and adherence by the three spheres of government to the principles of co-operative government and intergovernmental relations;
To follow up on the implementation of government priorities as identified for the three spheres of government;
To enhance public participation programmes through educating the people, especially in rural villages, and creating forums for public consideration of issues affecting provinces; and
To initiate and implement programmes aimed at assisting the vulnerable groups in society.
The framework plan identifies seven oversight priority areas, which are in line with our mandate as this House.
Today I would like to briefly talk about a few things which I think are very important, because I don't have the time to touch on the many issues. The issue of co-ordination, firstly, is vital and all of us who have been elected have a pivotal role to play in terms of establishing and doing our work in a better way.
We have highlighted the importance of co-ordinating our work, as the legislative sector, across the three spheres of government. This has become more urgent to ensure that we use resources efficiently and effectively. That is very important. With a lack of co-ordination we are not going anywhere.
I am also looking forward to seeing all of us in the three spheres of government co-ordinating our work for the sake of saving those resources and channelling them to assist the people on the ground. We have seen the benefit of this; we are not just talking. We have seen the benefit of co- ordination in how we approached our outreach programme in the past, with the national, provincial and local spheres of government working together to attend to the issues facing our people on the ground.
We think that is very important and that is critical, and I want to make a request to each and every one of you seated here today that we go home and think carefully about how all of us, particularly in the legislative sector, can co-ordinate our work.
I want to appeal to the hon premiers who are here with us today, and those who have representatives, because at times we battle to co-ordinate our work with the provinces. At times we ask that our speakers should attend such gatherings and take part in such discussions very openly, because in the legislative sector they are the people who do the co-ordination. They are the people who we contact from day to day, and they are the people with whom we work. This type of co-ordination with the legislative sector will just make our work easy and simple.
We also highlighted oversight as an important tool in the hands of legislators across the different spheres, especially at local level. We welcome your observation, Mr President, during your meeting with the mayors in Khayelitsha last week, that the fusion of the executive and legislative mandate, at the municipal council level, creates problems. It needs to be addressed.
We have put a high premium on monitoring and assessment. As a result of our plan, we envisage an annual mandatory assessment of our performance.
We will use the information and communications technology, ICT, infrastructure to track performance against the targets we have set, because this has been a problem for quite a number of years for the NCOP. We have now, however, found a solution. At the push of a button, we will know if a committee is letting us down or helping us to achieve the objectives. This is not enough; people on the ground must tell us whether our work impacts positively or not.
To do all these things, administrative support will need to be aligned so as to support the new mandate and the work of the NCOP. Provincial delegates are at the centre of the institution. They require appropriate support to carry out the mandate that I am talking about, because they are here daily and they know our problems. They are responsible for the oversight function and they are the people who need to be supported so that they can be in a position to do their job.
We have also identified a few challenges which we think should be addressed, as the President has also said at this podium. We have identified that the wave of the so-called service delivery protests that have hit the country must teach us a lesson - all of us seated here.
These incidents call for introspection. Do our people no longer have the hope that when they are faced with service delivery challenges, institutions such as the NCOP, for instance, could act on their behalf? We need to do introspection. It's just correct that we should do this and look at ourselves.
We should ask ourselves why people resort to destroying property in order to raise their views, instead of engaging the relevant role-players and stakeholders on the ground because we have the stakeholders - the provincial government, the local municipalities and constituencies offices, we have everybody who wants to assist - on the ground. Why can't we engage and make sure that we all assist? In fact, this is their property, because it is financed through public funds that are raised through taxes.
Mr President, when you addressed the NCOP workshop in July 2004, in your capacity as the Deputy President and leader of government business, you made reference to complaints about poor municipal service delivery, which included poor customer care.
The President actually raised this some years ago and I want to quote you when you said:
We can do all we can to make municipalities successful financially, but if we do not get the basic customer care or Batho Pele issues right, ordinary citizens will continue to say the local government sphere is failing them.
Mr President, you then proceeded to say:
Provinces should also be on hand to assist in improving these services, thereby providing the seamless, efficient service provision from spheres of government simultaneously, with Parliament, especially the NCOP, being the eyes and the ears of the public.
I want to thank the premiers for the fact that in September we had the chance to visit all the provinces. Our delegations went along. We were received very positively by the cream of the premiers that we have today in this government. I am particularly impressed that some of you did not sit in your offices. You went out immediately to go and check the issues that we told you we had seen needed to be attended to.
Mr Mathale, the Premier of Limpopo, I must thank you very much. Yesterday you went to an area which was critical for the premier to go to and have a look at and take action. And you did that, and we discussed it with you. I must thank you. I thank all other premiers who have done that. [Applause.]
That is the type of co-operation that the President is talking about. That is the type of co-operative governance that we're talking about. Because all of us are here to represent those very people who have elected us to be here.
We are not here because it is our wish. We are here because we were elected by the people. We are the voices of those people. They are hopeless without us talking on their behalf and getting things sorted out for them. So I want to thank you all that you have stood up and gone out there and assisted us in dealing with all those issues, and I congratulate you on that.
Service delivery and the legal framework is very important. All of us have to be engaged, from the local municipalities to all three spheres of government, as the Constitution directs that we all have to get involved and assist the third sphere of government.
In conclusion, once again, thank you very much to the hon President who addressed us this afternoon. From time to time we will reflect on these issues, Mr President, including the inputs from provinces and organised local government, as we continue to respond to the mandate before us.
The NCOP occupies a unique position in our constitutional setup. It is better positioned to harmonise the interests of the different spheres of government in the spirit of promoting co-operative government and intergovernmental relations. Thank you for listening to me. [Applause.]