So that's the central issue. The central issue, whatever party you belong to, is that a large number of our people are not engaged in productive work and we need a developmental state to cure that, because your private sector will not do it. You see, they have realised in Europe that you cannot depend on the private sector to remedy the kind of structural problem that we have, and so we need a developmental state.
People have been talking about South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and so on. I was very fortunate a year or two ago to interview Prof Ha-Joon Chang, who is a South Korean economist at Cambridge University. I asked him, what exactly happened in South Korea? We get the wrong impression by reading newspapers and so on about what happened in South Korea, and it is highly irrelevant to us. He said the key to South Korea's success was the development of productive capabilities by investment in machines, education, infrastructure, research and development. That was the key. He said that as far as we are concerned - now listen carefully - we must build more domestic linkages internally. We must ensure that there were tens of thousands of subcontractors, people who work in small enterprises, people who grow their enterprises by relying on procurement from large firms - which is what they did in South Korea - small enterprises that depend on procurement from the large firms and from the state, and that we must constantly raise the proportion of parts and components that are bought from local producers and not imported.
Indeed, in South Korea there were rules and laws which said that a company, including a multinational company, could not be allowed to operate and import goods which could be manufactured locally. So the emphasis in South Korea was not just on the big chaebols [conglomerates] and the big motorcar manufacturers by foreign firms. The emphasis was actually on building small capacity by small people - in this country, that would mean black people in the main - in order to ensure that you built the economy from below.
So the key to South Africa's problem of the large number of people who are not in productive work is not welfare; it is not your view about the state not intervening and so on.
On the contrary, what the state must do in South Africa, increasingly, is to raise the capabilities of domestic firms by training, by promoting opportunities, by ensuring that state agencies buy South African and not overseas goods, and that the private sector too is regulated in that what it uses are primarily South African resources, produced by South Africans that are trained in South Africa - and that there is not export-oriented growth, which, I'm afraid, we have been following for some time.
Let me end by saying this: South Africa is a very rich country. It is rich in resources; it has huge amounts of mineral resources and natural resources of all kinds; and huge human potential resources. Those human potential resources have not been put to work and that is why I return to the main point of this debate.
The main point is not about big states, small states, the private sector or not the private sector, but it is about the large proportion of South African people that are not engaged in productive work. And your policies will never make it happen, but we will, because we are the ANC. [Applause.]