Date: 29/09/2004
Source: Ministry of Correctional Services
Title: N Balfour: Imbizo Focus Week at Potchefstroom Correctional Centre


ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICES, MR N BALFOUR, MP, AT THE IMBIZO AND OUTREACH PROGRAMME HELD, Potchefstroom Correctional Centre, 29 September 2004

Programme Director Joe Makgoba
Reverend Mogomotsi
MEC for Safety and Liaison Ms Maureen Modiselle
Speaker of the North West Legislature Ms Thandi Modise
Mayor of Potchefstroom Mr TR Mampe
Honourable Councillors
Commissioner Linda Mti
Regional Commissioner Watson Tshivhase
Community Leaders and Invited Dignitaries
Representatives of Provincial Departments, Local Government, the Judiciary, the Legal Fraternity, NGOs, CBOs, Faith-based Organisations and Community Organisations
Area Commissioners and Heads of Correctional Centres
DCS Members
Inmates and their Families
Ladies and Gentlemen

I paid a visit to the Training College at Zonderwater, just outside Pretoria, yesterday afternoon. We have a total of 461 students at the college training to become Correctional Officials. In days gone by, they would have been referred to as warders and correctional centres were referred to as prisons with inmates known as prisoners.

I would have been known as the Minister of Prisons instead of being the Minister of Correctional Services. Prisoners would have been locked up for punishment.

I shared all of this with the students and welcomed them into the Correctional Services family. I also pointed out to them that they were in the unique position of being the first intake of students to be trained in the new strategic direction of Correctional Services. I said to them that in a sense, they are pioneers entering a place of new beginnings.

Yes, Correctional Services is a place of new beginnings, where we are endeavouring to move away from the culture of prisons into a culture of corrections. We want to move into an era where we do not regard offenders as outcasts. We want to move into an era of hope, of corrections, of rehabilitation, of restorative justice, of giving offenders a second chance at a new beginning.

Those students are at the coalface of this exciting change. They will not be caught up in the past when offenders were treated with contempt. They will not carry baggage of a discredited system which treated people less than human. They are in an era where we have respect for human rights and dignity; where we do not loathe and hate the inmates but hate the wrongs that they have done. But still, we reach out to them, giving them an opportunity to seek new beginnings and to start afresh after paying their debt to society.

Quite a number of the students at Zonderwater come from Mpumalanga, North West and Limpopo. Some of them might even be sons and daughters of some of you. They seem to have settled in very well and I shared with them the new beginnings that we envisage within Correctional Services.

This morning, I would want to share some of those new beginnings with you. We are now in our tenth year of democracy and this country is very different to what many of us experienced before 1994. Our new beginnings came about on 27 April 1994 and we have just completed a decade of freedom. But, we all realise and accept that we have still some distance to go before reaching our destination of a country where we are free of poverty, unemployment and crime.

Your government, led by the African National Congress of which I am a proud and dedicated member, received a huge mandate from the people of South Africa to govern and lead. Through the ballot box, you told us that we have to continue with and expand the new beginnings. You entered into a Peoples