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In the coming week the ANC will hold its largest political school, the National General Council (NGC). The NGC's task is to assess where we are since the 2007 Polokwane National Conference. The organisation will conduct introspection and discuss all issues around the implementation of its policies, the state of the organisation and its allies, the government performance with regard to the implementation of the 5 priority areas.

One of the major activities of our revolution in the current phase of our democracy is the acceleration of our national democratic transformation agenda which is rolling in several fronts, not only politically through our electoral democratic system but also through our social and economic empowerment in the creation of a better life for all.

We will do this in the face of uncertain global circumstances as well as loss of jobs at home. The global economic system suffered a near collapse which plunged the world's biggest economies into regressive growth. Despite these conditions our burgeoning economy is showing resilience although at low levels of growth. Yet our biggest challenge is to turn the situation to where the sectors of the economy creates sustainable jobs at an increasing scale to compensate for the job losses which we suffered when the economic recession hit our trading partners in the Europe, Asia and Americas. Thus the need to increase growth for the strengthening of opportunities for job creation cannot be overemphasized.

The world is faced with the challenge of cross boarder crimes, mastered by syndicates with huge potential of undermining the integrity of financial systems across the globe. The problem is associated with money laundering and hacking of bank financial systems through cyber attacks etc. It is estimated that organized crimes including identity theft, bank and internet phishing cost the South African economy about R1 Billion. Evidence also shows that these kinds of cybercrimes are also in the increase across the globe which means we must raise the bar in terms of identity security generally.

We, as the ANC have to find appropriate means of responding to these global challenges whilst taking steps locally to craft safety net for our young democracy. Clearly, our economy must diversify to create more sustainable jobs in sectors such as large scale electronics manufacturing, technical services, and SMME development within a coops model. These will require that the economy to invest huge capital to ensure that our country joins the leagues of China and Japan in the manufacturing of electronics components for global market consumption. In this endeavour we aim to grow of SMME sector through as the key participants and beneficiaries of the Electronics Manufacturing Strategy.

We are alive to the fact that for us to achieve the high levels of specialized manufacturing, we do not only require a serious capital investment in the industry but also partnership with industry to further investments in skills development in various technical fields. Our government has, for instance, established the Skills Development Council as well as the ICT-Skills Council to look into this problem of skills production for the modern economy.

The ICT Skills Council has begun to work on the labour market intelligence and analysed skills framework to determine gaps and the mismatch in competencies required for the economy. These models have also shown an example of skills development on one hand and the experience and exposure in the development of enterprises that are service oriented.

During the Stellenbosch Conference we "recognized the increasing role of innovation-led growth in successful modern economies and the threat posed by inadequate investment in the drivers of innovation, in particular research and development upon which our strategic industries are anchored, e.g. minerals and agriculture, and software design and electronics manufacturing".
We further resolved to "explore the prospects of small-scale digital manufacturing which can be easily accessed by small and medium sized enterprises".

These resolutions have been implemented in some areas in that our research especially in the knowledge driven sectors have suffered skills shortages especially in areas of science, engineering, technical and technologies. Our electronics manufacturing sector has been dormant whilst shredding jobs and only maintaining short-term jobs on seasonal basis.

With the advent of new opportunities for electronics manufacturing reinforced by the regional free trade agreement in the SADC region, several products can be locally manufactured for trading within the region and elsewhere. South Africa exports four million electronic products such as digital decoders to Brazil, and India, within our South-South partnership programme.

The global trends in technological evolution have resulted in the emergence of bundled ICT services, e.g. voice, date and audio in single stream or network also referred to as convergence. This is the crux of the matter that for us to impact in Rural Development specifically creating regional vibrant economies in rural towns, we need high-speed broadband infrastructure networks to be able to deliver multiple services to propel business activities. Through these networks we can also achieve the delivery of curriculum online for education, and provide health services and efficient management of hospital centres and patient information through integrated information systems even for the criminal justice system. This is how we understand the crosscutting role of information technologies to support service delivery.

The employment of skilled personnel for the management and administration of such complex governance mechanisms is critical hence we emphasize the importance of investment in skills development for our people. As we witnessed the consistent delivery of quality picture using advanced network infrastructure built for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, our country is capable of delivering the same kinds of services for our economic and social sectors for the delivery of efficient services without wastage of resources.

In the recent past, we observed that several municipalities in the country, e.g. Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and others began investments in fibre-optic networks spending several billions of rands. These initiatives were supported through a Broadband Policy Framework which recognizes the need for broadband capacity to deliver social services through digital networks. We took a Broadband Policy to Cabinet which contemplates a penetration level of 15 percent by 2019.

Investment in Broadband infrastructure is done through government-established entities, such as Broadband Infraco and Sentech, as well as fixed and wireless networks by the private sector amounting to billions of rands. In other instances, municipalities and provincial governments applied a Public Private Partnership model of building these networks.

The greatest challenge is on how to approach infrastructure development in rural areas where it is clear that the private sector does not show interest to invest in infrastructure capability for internet connections and high-speed access to data. The issue we would discuss includes options for ICT infrastructure development in rural and semi-rural areas across the country. And the question we need to ask ourselves is "has our State-Owned Enterprises delivered the requirements for an integrated infrastructure in the rural areas inter-connected with existing ones." In this instance, we also need the private sector to play a key developmental role in partnership with government for the benefit of all our people.

In analyzing the scenarios in ICT infrastructure spending in the recent past, we recognize that provinces and municipalities with smaller local economies are not be able to make the kinds of investments for the construction of ICT backbone networks similar to large regional economies like Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal. The Gauteng Province for instance had planned an investment of up to R700 Billion in ICT infrastructure by 2008 within its Blue-IQ project (B-Link) whilst projecting an improved economic growth of up to 15 percent increase in GDP by 2015.

These investments funded through a public private partnership model can be replicated in other provinces as part of the long-term strategic partnership for delivery within the context of our comprehensive rural development agenda. In other words, with government providing leadership and part of funding for infrastructure development, more private investment will accrue to partner on our transformation of rural areas into centres of economic and social livelihood.

As we stated earlier, the world faces the challenge of global cyber-security which definition mean, an online crime-threats such as spam or cyber attacks which when they reach their target often small and large critical information databases, will result in the loss of information or undermine the information contained in such databases through information loss.

Governments across the globe spend billions of dollars on these kinds of problems. The other forms of online crimes include the disguise of companies in hospitality, financial services and others where moneys of people are stolen without the members of the public noticing. Several of these similar cases were reported during our hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup where people bought tickets and paid monies into disguised accounts believing them to be legitimate FIFA account. The challenge of identity theft, which is often, a cross boarder cyber crime also manifest in some form of money laundering is generally on the increase.

These problems call for a wider debate and a resolve on strengthening of cyber security measures at a national scale in all sectors of the economy and our government is not immune to these wide spread problems. Our critical information databases and networks have to be safeguarded against cyber and manual sabotage. In other instances, government has taken pro-active measures to ensure that personal details of all users of mobile phones are registered for security purposes through the Regulation of Information and Communications Act (RICA).

This legislation requires that mobile operators such as Vodacom, MTN and Cell C must register all the personal data of their users in the information database. We raise these matters to highlight that the worlds IT problems have advanced enough to warrant national attention and therefore new forms of policy responses are necessary.

The report to the National General Council on Communications specifically the Information and Communications Technologies raises several issues emanating from the several workshops that were convened by the NEC Sub-committee on Communications. Notable progress has been made on issues such as the development of community radios, competition in ICT sector market and growth, and infrastructure investment in some areas. However, there is still much more to be done to fulfil the aspirations contained in the Resolutions of Polokwane and Stellenbosch. This conclusion is informed by evidence on the assessment of the progress made in implementing the congress resolutions.

Although the NGC is not meant to deal with new policy issues we are concerned that new policy directives will be necessary to guide us to towards the Policy Conference and 2012 National Congress in Mangaung. Parallel to this process, government needs to work on the implementation plans for the policies which currently have not been implemented.

The ANC has a strategic goal of ensuring universal access to Information and Communication Technology services to all the people of South Africa. This goal is inspired by the need to redress the imbalances of the past, particularly the digital gab that exists between the urban and rural poor. The transformation agenda in the country has as one of its pillars the improvement of the condition of life of our people. We have to look at the role of ICTs in development and how we have can take advantage of the ICT tools and services to address the plight of our people.

We have taken a keen interest on this issue and concluded that our government has to lead the agenda of universal access to information and communication services. This challenge is not small because ubiquities access to services means that the availability of infrastructure in all areas of our country must be our key priority.

We have observed several policy gaps which in one way or another needs to be addressed to accelerate on the delivery of the ANC commitments. Our people must take centre stage in the use of information and technologies to improving their own livelihood. We are observing that the world has began a quantum leap to create new digital infrastructure such as international gateways that connects to the continents across the world to deliver high volumes of data more faster than ever before. These developments lead by the developed world were also supported by the efficient utilization of radio frequencies to find solutions to new problems and to grow the economy.

This digital revolution, as it is often referred, means that the developing world must catch up to operate on the same level with the developed world in the north. In essence, this is a challenge in that the global economy and its efficiencies are heavily reliant on the availability and efficient of such systems with the possibility to deliver bundled services. The economy will not properly compete in the global market if the systems are not advanced enough to handle requirements of the global market as shown in the stock exchanges and valuation of the market products across the globe.

The unfortunate reality is that we will not afford to even defer the digitization of our infrastructure and systems to another day. The situation is even more serious for our wider African continent whose determination is to be part of this new form of economic order - the digital economy. Africa cannot afford to miss this opportunity to be wired in order to ensure intra-connection and to the rest of the world.

The issue we are raising here is a demonstration of the catalytic role of information and communications technologies for all sectors of the economy. The information and communication propels economic and social growth, and all other sectors. For example, agriculture must consider how ICTs can support their agricultural growth prospects, one as early warning systems but also as the way of providing easy trade market for agriculturally produced goods and services. In Kenya and other parts of central Africa, we have learnt how ordinary people use mobile phones for trading on livestock and processing payment without exchanging hard cash thereby addressing crime related fears through mobile money transfer, to using mobiles to check prices of tradable products.

Information and Communication must be seen as a cross cutting theme for all economic sectors including the knowledge sector. This is why the investment by government and partners on education network like SANREN must be expanded to reach all centres of our education and knowledge production. We also have to think about the kinds of human capital required for the advanced world of information and technology.

We have to compete on manufacturing of tools and components used in our society, to also diversify the services economy to deliver new economic sectors. This will not be possible when our human development index lower than that of our peers, when our research and development outputs are so low due to a variety of issues, when our broadband penetration is simply seating at about 2 percent, when our kinds cannot use computers and internet to access any information that is easily available on the internet.

Our government has established both the ICT Skills Council and the recently established Skills Development Council after having realized that the skills production does not meet the skills demands for our economic and social sectors. This mismatch is also compounded by the fact that our country also experiences brain drain in skilled personnel to other destinations particularly Europe and other developed countries.

Innovation, creativity and development is underpinned by levels of ICT skills a country is able to produce and what the people are able to apply. Our general communities must be educated in the use and the application of ICT tools for the benefit of their own livelihood as it related to the building the information society. Which means that our people require certain level of knowledge to benefit meaningfully on the digital revolution?

Our system of education must prepare our learners for the kind of sophisticated reality of the digital world to have a meaningful role in directing how these technologies can assist in finding solutions to problems facing the contemporary society. As we always say, technology must service the needs of our people.

We have to think about what the technology can do to support development, for education, for health, for agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, etc in order to come up with a national comprehensive ICT Strategy for the country that is futuristic enough to carry us over the next 15 to 20 years. Notwithstanding the fact that technologies develop rapidly, however social and economic conditions within which technology can be applied remains the same. Our challenge for providing ICT services in rural areas remains key for the country to leapfrog to social and economic prosperity.

The ICT sector has a critical role to play in support of our five priorities we have identified in our election manifesto. We must as a matter of approach to rural development seek to place ICT infrastructure in the similar category like water and sanitation or roads. The integrated planning of the country's infrastructure can underpin the focus on new residential and business developments zones.

As started earlier, we can put ICTs at the service of the people by focusing on supporting the five priorities of government for delivery. ICTs can support SMME Development, we can also use technologies in support of the criminal justice system to manage justice backlog whilst fighting crime. We can commit to use technologies to support ICT Rural Development that gives our people broader access information and knowledge and develop new industries in support of sustainable job creation with specific focus on youth who also need to provide with industry skills for a job ready work force.

Our broadcasting landscape is facing major technology reform with the migration from analogue to digital transmission for multi-media service which can also allow interactive services. The changes will allow us to designate a dedicated information channels with specific focus on health, education and enterprise development and youth. We must implement these measures with great speed to be in line with global trends and to also allow for other new broadcasters who may bring diversity into the whole broadcasting landscape whilst achieving our black empowerment goals.

Work must move with speed to position the country in the globalised economic structure on its path for growth and development. The ANC ICT Strategy perspective must consolidate and provide direction on most of these issues we have highlighted.

Working together we can do more!