Date: 09/02/2009

Source: Inkatha Freedom Party

Title: IFP: Buthelezi: Response by the President of the IFP to the State of the Nation Address

Madam Speaker,

We reply to the President's State of the Nation address in strange times and under strange circumstances. I believe we all like and deeply respect the President; - but he seems to be President only in title and not in fact. As he himself indicated, he is a caretaker for somebody else who is not a member of this House. Yet the President tells us that when tested under such present strange circumstances our democratic order and our Constitution have held and remained unharmed.

In the strange circumstances under which he delivered his address, the President mainly recollected the achievements of our democracy in the past fifteen years and the well known chronic challenges confronting our Government. However, he did not acknowledge problems within our Government and our society, nor could he provide leadership and solutions for them. He put forward that this House has to complete its mandate given in 2004 and maintain its present course, so that whatever needs to be done will be addressed after the forthcoming elections.

He could not say more and in fact did not, because it is obviously somebody else's role to provide the leadership which would ordinarily rest in the office of our President. Under these strange circumstances, we react to the President's speech not as much for what was said but with emphasis on what was omitted.

The President portrayed a government unaltered by recent events, the majority party maintaining its policies, and the country maintaining its previously chartered course under his leadership. The tone of his address was that everything was well, everything is well and everything will be well. Yet, this begs questioning why our previous President was fired before the completion of his term, an unprecedented event in the history of post-liberation Africa.

Something had to have been seriously wrong to have such a draconian measure to put right.

It is not my habit to comment on what happens within other political parties. However, when their internal dynamics affect the highest institutions of our Republic leading to a sudden change in the Head of State and most of his Cabinet, the matter affects us all and ought to be discussed. We understood such change having been brought on the wave of dissatisfaction with policies and leadership up to that point.

The ruling party recognised the need for change and promised change. Yet, the President's address suggests that no change is required and no change will come. As we all recognise that change is indeed needed, the time has now come for change to be brought about not from within the ruling party, but through the contribution of the other political forces represented in this House and through a renewal of this House itself.

The President projected a reassuring image of our future, suggesting that the thunderstorm now gathering worldwide will miraculously skip our shores. It is true that during the Great Depression of 1929 South Africa remained one of the least affected economies for its reliance on its precious metals. But things have dramatically changed since. When British Prime Minister Brown warned at the World Economic Forum that the entire world is in a depression, or about to fall into one, we would be ill-advised to believe that South Africa is out of this world.

When the President tells us that the state of our nation is fine and is going to remain such, I beg to differ. Too many South Africans have already begun suffering and things will become much worse in the years to come. The road ahead is harsh and hard and projecting a different hope will undermine our country's capacity to build up its readiness to cope with it.

The dramatic nature of the times calls for the patriotism of the people of South Africa, which is the greatest asset our Government can mobilise. The President made reference to the inspiring values of our Constitution which are indeed of paramount importance. But there is no hiding from the fact that our constitution has been betrayed and the people of South Africa have rightly grown disillusioned with those called upon to promote these values.

Within government, the fundamental divide between right and wrong, integrity and corruption, service of the people and personal enrichment, efficiency and incompetence, hard work and laziness and between party and State has been compromised. But, within South Africa's civil society there is a vast pool of hard working, competent, efficient men and women of integrity. We must ask ourselves how many of them have really been attracted into the highest echelons of government and politics.

This is the time to bind together the healthy, honest, productive and competent segments of our nation, irrespective of political affiliations, social and economic status, race and religion. It is time to part the good from the evil and empower the good. I am saddened that our Government continues this unjustified policy of disenfranchising our compatriots residing abroad. When I was Minister of Home Affairs I received documentation showing that there was no administrative reason not to allow these compatriots to vote, especially when we make voting facilities available to South Africans who are abroad for travel, study or temporary work. South Africa must now count on all its citizens of integrity, whether living within its borders or beyond them. I am aware that South Africans residing abroad are unlikely to vote for the IFP. For me, their right to vote is a matter of principle.

I am also concerned about how the intention to accelerate affirmative action, including Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment, will be perceived by the various segments of our society, and the possibility that more skilled South Africans may see a need to emigrate. A plan must be in place to prevent the further flight of skills and expertise out of South Africa. The President himself, in his capacity as Secretary-General of the ruling Party, is on record expressing his concerns over the implementation of these policies. While I see the rationale behind them, the implementation of these policies should be looked at again in-so-far as they are perceived as discrimination against certain South Africans.

We ought to focus not only on the facts and figures the President gave us, but first and foremost on the values of our democracy to which he referred. Because of its proximity to the next elections, the nation is looking at this debate to see who to trust and where the country ought to be led when the impending storm hits us.

Our people do not need to dwell on facts and figures produced in universities or government research offices, aimed at explaining to them what they experience every day. They know what is happening. They have seen the price of groceries escalating, the real estate market crumbling, savings held in stock markets wiped out, job opportunities vanishing, entire segments of our industry winding down and their businesses facing ever-decreasing turnovers. They know that this is just the beginning of a deeper crisis in the making. They don't need any of us to tell them this. They need to hear from us what we are planning to do to redress it and who they can trust to implement what has been promised.

For too long, elections have been held to reward the party with the biggest promises. This habit shaped government policies and promises and year after year informed state-of-the-nation addresses. In this sense, this year's state of the nation address is somehow refreshing, as it promises so little. But it marks no departure from a past in which neither the ruling party nor the government under it did what was said or said what they did.

Job creation perhaps epitomises an entire attitude which must be corrected.

Under the current ruling party, our Government correctly focussed on job creation. But it did so in terms of promises in the guise of objectives, and policies, studies, summits, workshops and analyses, and whenever asked to report on progress on this fundamental matter it did so by stating how much of these complex activities have been performed. Yet all this boils down to talking about the problem rather than doing anything which effectively addresses it.

We now have heard again about summits, but there are no reliable figures which tell us how many jobs were created by direct government intervention and by indirect economic incentives. Therefore, we remain ill-prepared to develop a strategy to deal with the recessionary environment in which jobs will be shed like leaves in autumn.

We surely do not need more summits and workshops and a class of political bureaucrats who rely on such tools and related promises to deal with a real problem.

We cannot continue to deal with real problems by playing with the figures, hiding the statistics, manipulating the facts or turning words around so that, with euphemisms, the horror of the matters sounds better. For instance, the President reassured us that we have proportionally the largest programme of anti-retroviral drugs in the world, which suggests that the scourge of HIV/Aids is now under control. Yet, he does not emphasise that we have proportionally the highest incidence of HIV/Aids in the world and that in spite of its magnitude, what is being done is still widely insufficient as anti-retroviral drugs are not reaching all those who need them.

Years after it became necessary for the Constitutional Court to order our health facilities to do what was their duty to do of their own volition, namely supplying anti-retroviral drugs at birth, there are still many HIV positive mothers who do not receive such simple, inexpensive and effective life-saving treatment to prevent their newborn babies from becoming infected.

We cannot continue to feel reassured just because we are told that something good is being done to deal with the gravest of our problems. We need to ask ourselves whether what is done is good enough and develop the critical capacity to provide real leadership. Our country is in a leadership crisis and in this House we are guilty of being part of this problem. The President told us that our Constitution is holding. Yet the purpose of this House is not that of applauding the President, but rather that of holding him and his Cabinet accountable for failures. Constitutionally, this creates an obligation for each of us not to praise the good that has been done, but criticise the Government for that which is not good enough.

I dare any member of this House to stand before us to tell us in good conscience that he or she feels that our education system, our policing, our healthcare system, our economy, our poverty alleviation programmes, our employment conditions, our housing programs and the state of our rural areas, are good enough. Obviously they are not. In his address the President pre-empts this criticism by harping on the fact that the long journey has but begun and much more remains to be done; - all of which may be good to excuse the failures of his government, but surely does not justify the failures of this House to constantly and incessantly point to this unfinished agenda to maintain the momentum and set the pace.

In this House, we are constitutionally required to be the leaders and yet we have become the followers. Parliament has become a tool on demand of the President, the President's Cabinet, the ruling party, its National Executive Committee and, at times, of the few people among us who set our rules and schedules. If our Constitution is really to hold and our democracy flourish the way the President would hope, we must establish the centrality of Parliament and empower it with real leadership.

For instance, under the Constitution it is the responsibility of this House to elect the President. The purpose of elections is only that of electing the members of this House, not that of electing a President. Yet many members of this House are running the political process as if this Parliament has declined this responsibility and the forthcoming elections were about electing a President.

The lamentable state of this Parliament is no minor matter, as it affects the state of our nation. It pains my heart to see some of the brightest and most capable of our colleagues moving to greener pastures in recognition that this grand hall of democracy has become dull, vacuous, ineffective and possibly useless. From the benches of the ruling party, we have seen one bright and competent leader after another leaving their seat to take up highly remunerated positions within Government, in private companies, in publicly held companies and in other organs of State. Everything else seems preferable to being at the helm of our democracy, as this Parliament ought to be.

From the opposition benches we have seen an equal haemorrhaging. Today we are in the lamentable state of receiving not only the farewell address of the former Leader of the Opposition, the Honourable AJ Leon, but also that of the present Leader of the Opposition, the Honourable S Botha. This takes place after two of their highest ranking leaders accepted other ambassadorial positions to Thailand and Bulgaria respectively. These losses hurt not only the important role the opposition is called upon to play, but also the strength of our democracy.

The greatest example of this weakness is perhaps embodied in the image of our own President who, on all accounts, seems to have proven to have great skills and abilities, begging the question why he has only recently joined us in this Parliament. I fear that there might be truth in the answer that until recently he had better things to do, which proves the point that it is not in this sacred hall of democracy that the real business of government is taking place.

The President has announced that he will soon set the election date, which will thrust all parties into frantic efforts to draft candidate lists. I think that the Honourable Andrew Mlangeni and I are the doyens of this House, both of us having matriculated in 1947. I do not think there are many Honourable Members who have that record! In this capacity I wish to plead with all political leaders to bring back a new Parliament which is rich in competent and effective people with actual skills in the many fields where the challenges ahead lie.

The next Parliament will need to restructure our education system which, no matter how our President puts it, has failed present challenges and is vastly ill-prepared to meet future challenges. The World Bank has published a study suggesting that 50% of those born at this time will have to apply for jobs which do not yet exist, which means that we must train our children to deal with information we do not yet know.

Instead, our education system has produced an entire generation educated under the new post-liberation curriculum with much higher-than-before rates of matriculation failures, drop-outs, disciplinary problems and across-the-board mismanagement. I would not wish our Minister of Education to feel this is a personal attack. I am speaking about the situation that has developed since 1994.

While our Government struggles to deliver already obsolete and sub-standard text books, the children in China, India and the United States, with whom our own children will need to compete in the global village, are being educated by means of computers linked to the boundless knowledge and information of the Internet. While in those countries the Internet has eliminated the divides amongst children on account of regions of the world and socio-economic status, our education system is still perpetuating them. This is just not good enough.

I could take the rest of the day to point out that which is equally not good enough in all the other functions of government, but this would not aid the point I wish to emphasise, which is that a fundamental change of attitude and governance is required. We cannot continue to come to this House and gloat over what we have achieved in the past, which is now subject to the law of diminishing returns. We seem to have even reached the desperation of ranking among our government achievements the extraordinary successes of our national cricket and rugby teams, while the real of job of government in respect of sport and recreation is that of making facilities available to all our citizens for their physical fitness, moral regeneration and entertainment. In this latter respect, I am quite sure that few people of conscience would stand up in this House to state that what we have achieved is good enough.

In conclusion, I urge members of this House to acknowledge that something has gone wrong and conjure over our nation the spirit of change so that together we may put it right. The hope for change must start from within this House, for if we do not change we cannot expect the rest of the country to do so. It is time to bind the nation together under one constitution and within one patriotic spirit which prepares us to face the imminent crisis.

To do so, we must embrace the harsh discipline of the truth. We must make the truth our sole authority and stop taking authority for truth. The truth is that our Constitution is in great peril, our democracy is in great jeopardy, and our country is sailing straight into a massive storm for which we are ill-prepared.

The truth is that we can begin dealing with all this, if this House changes and lives up to the responsibilities for which it was established and which our nation expects of it.

I thank you.