Deputy Chairperson, hon members, I will forever be grateful for the opportunities that are presented to me by Parliament in order to be able to address the House and the nation on this particular subject, which is very close to my heart.
I am also very humbled by the current youth for continuously granting me permission to share in their platform. My generation was tasked with the responsibility to participate in the national democratic struggle, whose objective was to eradicate apartheid and all its vestiges.
All generations of youth have their challenges laid down for them. By way of illustration: In the 1940s you had the formation of the youth league, with its own programme, which was very dynamic. You had the leadership of the ANC Youth League, in the name of Comrades Kathrada, Mandela and Sisulu. All of them were activists as young people.
In the 1950s you had the Defiance Campaign. The young people of that time were tasked with the responsibility of defying all apartheid legislation. They were supposed to break the law by entering any public amenity that was white or designated as white. In the 1960s, you had the pass campaigns, Rivonia and the formation of uMkhonto weSizwe, MK.
What this means, in essence, is that all young people, of any epoch, have their challenges. Most fortunately, the South African youth never turned away from the challenges; they always came forward to be counted.
In 1970, again, they were charged with the responsibility to dismantle the pillars of apartheid. Bantu education, as we knew it, ceased to exist in the townships. Local government structures were also demolished. These are but some of the contributions which young people were able to make during that time.
We applaud the National Youth Development Agency. It has been launched as a development agency during the celebrations of June 16 this year, 2009. A consultative process of two years finally gave birth to this agency when the President of the Republic signed the National Youth Development Agency Act, Act 54, on 23 December 2008.
The main objectives of the National Youth Development Agency are: To ensure that the youth is able to access resources, in order to kickstart small enterprises; to create a space for job opportunities in the private and public sectors; and to open up internship programmes on a national scale.
Much as we welcome the establishment of the youth agency, we also want to say that it is critical for the structure to establish a small monitoring committee, which would be essential in order to keep track of the delivery process, as well as legitimate concerns which could be raised by the youth community. It cannot therefore be business as usual if there is a deluge of problems raised which are not attended to.
The President of the Republic, Comrade Zuma, says: "All hands on deck". This means, in essence, that positions in the National Youth Development Agency are not positions of entitlement; they are, therefore, positions which have been allocated to members of the youth agency in order to serve the youth of South Africa.
I just want to share a very short story with hon members. This was a long time ago. I was a youth but already grown up. In 1977, I had the honour of attending a sod-turning ceremony. It's a ceremony where they bring a shovel and they start to turn the soil in preparation for the building of whatever structure. I attended this one as an uninvited guest. We got word, as the leadership of the Soweto Students' Representative Council, that the late Dr Connie Mulder would be turning the first sod in Soweto for the building of another Bantu education school, as we perceived it at that time.
When he took the podium to speak, I grabbed the microphone, not from him but from the master of ceremonies, and addressed the gathering. I grabbed the spade that he was supposed to use to turn the sod and threw it away. After addressing the crowd, we shouted "Amandla!" [Power!] and ran away before the police came.
Today, in our new-found democracy, I am working side by side with his son, the hon Mulder, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. We are jointly using the same spade that I threw away earlier in order to build our democracy and deliver to our people, both black and white.
The principle of nonracialism is a principle on which the ANC will never compromise. If any member from any political party crosses to the side of the ANC and happens to be a white opposition member, we treat you like a South African, because that is what we see. We treat you like a member of the ANC, because that is what you are; we treat you as a comrade. We are able to embrace those who are now members of the ANC in the spirit of nonracialism, because those are policies that the ANC has engendered over the years. My colleague here spoke about the Freedom Charter. He said: "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white ..."
My colleague from the DA is quite perturbed about the high rate of unemployment, which also affects white youth. We have to be objective about this. The economic meltdown is hitting the rest of the continent and, in fact, the whole world. In the past, jobs were reserved simply because of the job reservation laws, where Africans would not be able to do certain types of jobs and whites would be privileged to do them. We are saying the job reservation laws have been done away with. Whatever problems we are going to experience in our democracy, we are all going to experience them, irrespective of whether we are white or black.
Let us give the South African economy a chance. It is true that inflation was a little high. Some time ago, the figure was 8,5%; it has gradually dropped to 8%. Food prices are gradually coming down, but some of the big companies continue to collude in order to raise food prices. You have a situation right now in which the Competition omission is battling with all these companies, such as Premier Foods, Atlas and a number of other companies which sell bread. This collusion is actually meant to benefit those particular companies - the price of bread would go up at the expense of the poor.
All that we are saying is: Give the South African economy a chance. I concur with Nkosi and our colleague here. I am not sure what "Thuma Mina" [Send me] means. If I knew, I would be able to speak on it. I thank you. [Applause.]
Debate concluded.