Date: 15/02/05
Source:  Democratic Alliance official website
Title: Leon: We must choose an open opportunity society

Statement issued by:  Tony Leon, Leader of the Official Opposition

Tuesday, February 15, 2005


  Introduction

President Thabo Mbeki painted a hopeful portrait of South Africa’s future in his State of the Nation Address last Friday.

Economic growth is rising. Social grants are expanding. Africa is taking her rightful place on the world stage.

Yet we cannot ignore the millions of South Africans who are still waiting to enjoy the fruits of freedom.

Seventy percent of South Africans today live below the international poverty line.

More than forty percent of working-age adults in our country are out of work.

Thirty-five percent of young people in their late twenties are infected with HIV.

And each year, an estimated ten million South Africans report that they have been victims of crime.

So it is true, as President Mbeki told us, that South Africa is at “a confluence of encouraging possibilities”.

But if we want to turn today’s possibilities into tomorrow’s realities, we will have to make some difficult choices.

We can choose to stay on our current path—the path of more state control and less delivery, more racialism and less tolerance, more authority and less democracy.

Or we can return to the path South Africa chose in 1994—the path of greater freedom, greater opportunity, and greater unity in the face of common challenges.

We cannot have it both ways.

We cannot, for example, hope to improve and expand government service delivery if we also carry out a policy of racial transformation that gets rid of some of the most skilled and experienced members of the public service.

We cannot help people feel a sense of belonging in the new South Africa if the government keeps attacking Afrikaans and marginalising other indigenous languages.

In 1976, a revolution erupted in Soweto because the government tried to force children in townships to learn in Afrikaans. Now, nearly thirty years later, the government is trying to force schools in Afrikaans-speaking communities to teach English.

We cannot promote reconciliation and understanding when the President’s own spokesperson, Mr Bheki Khumalo, refers to single-medium Afrikaans schools as a form of “apartheid-style influx control”.

We cannot promote non-racialism if the government tries to classify land and property by race.

Last year, while the country debated the use of racial profiling for donated blood, there was virtually no debate about the ANC’s use of racial profiling for nearly every other purpose under the sun.

We cannot build public trust in government by promising houses to people who live in shacks along the N2 highway, and ignoring the thousands of families who have spent years on the waiting list.

Most of all, we cannot uphold the Constitution if we allow the ruling party to take control of every branch of government, every independent state institution, and every space in public and private life.

We have to choose one path or the other.

Because if we continue to follow the ideological obsessions of race and power, we are going to continue to fall short of the practical goals we have set for our country’s progress.

That means fewer South Africans will succeed, and more South Africans will suffer, unless we change our direction.

Broken promises
In a remarkably candid moment in his address, the President admitted that only half (fifty-one percent) of his promises from last year were being fulfilled on time. A quarter of his promises (twenty-eight percent) were not being fulfilled at all, he told us.

That failure rate cannot simply be blamed on a few lazy government officials here and there.

It is what you get when you try to implement policies that contradict each other.

It is what you get when you put race first and delivery last.

It is what you get when you suppress criticism and reject open debate.

Despite some of the good news that the President shared with us, there were a number of key promises from last year that were broken and which he failed to account for directly in his address.

• Anti-retrovirals. For two years, South Africans have been promised that 53 000 Aids patients would soon receive anti-retroviral drugs. Yet as of December 2004, only 20 000 people were receiving them in public hospitals. Clearly the government is going to miss its March deadline once again.

• Jobs. Last year, the President promised to increase the capacity of the “First Economy” to create jobs. But his government has done nothing to stop thousands of jobs from disappearing in the textile industry and agriculture.

• Crime. The President also promised to improve safety and security in our nation’s communities. He informed us on Friday that 168 of South Africa’s 200 most wanted criminals have been arrested. We wish the prosecution service well in convicting them.

But 168 criminals cannot, by themselves, account for nearly 20 000 murders, more than 50 000 rapes and more than one million cases of theft last year.

Meanwhile, the people of South Africa still live in fear. In the past two weeks alone, three academics at the University of Cape Town have been murdered. That is an extraordinary number in a small community. And sadly, there are similar stories in communities all across South Africa.

Some of the government’s policies are actually hurting the fight against crime. The haphazard implementation of the Firearms Control Act and the elimination of the rural Commando system have made it more difficult for ordinary people to protect themselves from criminals.

The extension of state power
And despite the fact that the government cannot manage to deliver textbooks to learners in Mpumalanga on the first day of school, despite the fact that it cannot protect patients in Chris Hani Baragwanath from hospital-acquired infections, the state is extending its reach into every nook and cranny of life in South Africa.

The media, for example, is under constant pressure. The SABC has reverted to what it was under apartheid—a propaganda machine for the ruling party.

The judiciary, too, has come under attack. Last month the ANC warned that the “collective mindset” of judges had to be “transformed”—a statement that the International Bar Association described as “misguided and dangerous”.

South African sport continues to suffer the effects of constant political interference. The government has threatened to legislate racial quotas for all teams, from the Springboks and Proteas right down to schools level.

Even leisure time and recreation, it seems, will not be free from state control.

The President spoke on Friday about the Freedom Charter. Yet in South Africa today there is too much emphasis on the noun and not enough on the adjective—too many charters and not enough freedom.

The DA’s warnings
It is true that the ruling party won a resounding mandate from the voters in last year’s general election.

But sixty-nine percent of the vote does not equal one hundred percent of the people. Nor does it mean that the ruling party is right one hundred percent of the time, or that it has one hundred percent of the answers.

In fact, many of the challenges facing our country are problems that the Democratic Alliance has warned the government about for a long time.

Ten years ago, I stood in this House and argued that the Labour Relations Bill should be amended to allow exemptions for small business from industry-wide collective bargaining agreements.

We were told by the government that such exemptions were impossible—that they were conservative and reactionary.

Now, however, the President agrees with us. In an interview on television this past Sunday, he said that the need for exemptions for small business was “obvious”.

There are many other such examples of DA warnings that have proved correct.

In 2000, I travelled to Zimbabwe to meet with members of the opposition. When I returned, I met with our own Minister of Foreign Affairs and insisted that President Robert Mugabe was not merely seizing farms, but destroying democracy in his country.

Now, on the eve of next month’s parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe, President Mugabe is refusing to meet SADC leaders. Cosatu delegations and international observers are being turned away at the border. It is clear that democracy and human rights, not land, are at the core of the crisis in Zimbabwe.

Five years ago, I cautioned the President that HIV infections and Aids deaths would continue to rise if he did not change his denialist stance and begin an immediate rollout of anti-retroviral drugs.

He again refused. And tragically, the death toll has continued to mount. At least 1,5-million South Africans have already died of Aids, according to the government’s own estimates—which may be deliberately under-reporting Aids deaths.

When the government announced its plans for racial “transformation” in the public service, the DA warned that many of the best public servants would leave and that the poor would suffer from poor service delivery.

Today, the government is spending R600-million to hire back many of the same teachers in maths and science that it retrenched in the late 1990s at a cost of more than R1-billion.

And the Minister of Defence is complaining that only 144 out of 4 200 new recruits to the SANDF are white. Many of these unnecessary costs and bad outcomes were entirely predictable and avoidable.

A failure to listen
But this government only seems to listen to outside voices once it has exhausted all other possibilities.

It treats criticism from the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a threat to democracy, when in fact such criticism is the very lifeblood of democratic discourse.

It behaves towards its political rivals as if democratic opposition were illegitimate, unpatriotic, and “treasonous”, to quote one ANC leader in Parliament.

Last month in Sudan, the President could not bring himself to condemn the Sudanese government’s atrocities in Darfur.

Yet he found the courage and the occasion to accuse the South African opposition, thousands of miles away, of conducting a “cold war” against our government.

How ironic that the President travels abroad to encourage foreign governments to interact with their respective opposition parties, while making no effort to do the same at home.

Failing in the fight against corruption The President told us on Friday that he would soon convene a “Summit on Corruption” to discuss ways of strengthening the government’s anti-corruption structures.

Yet the government itself, under direct orders from the Presidency, has been the biggest obstacle preventing these structures from fulfilling their missions.

On Sunday the President revealed that he would appoint a commissioner to review and oversee the Scorpions.

Yet when the Scorpions were formed in 1999, then-Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna declared:
“There is no intention to tamper with the constitutionally and legislatively enshrined functional independence of the National Director of Public Prosecutions and the National Prosecuting Authority”.

The President himself proclaimed that the Scorpions would be a “signal of our commitment” to dealing with crime and corruption.

Yet now that the Scorpions are doing their job—however imperfectly—he wants to take away their sting.

Here in Parliament, the ruling party has done everything it can to stall and intimidate the Scorpions in an attempt to shield its own MPs from a full and open investigation in the Travelgate scandal.

And now the disgraced former ANC Chief Whip, Tony Yengeni, is complaining that he didn’t get the special private deal he says he was promised by the Minister of Justice at a cosy meeting at his home.

Ordinary people, like the travel agents outside Parliament, simply get arrested, charged, tried and punished. But the ANC expects to be protected from justice.

The Presidency itself, in its continuing attempts to suppress any serious probe into the arms deal, has paralysed and subdued the Heath Special Investigating Unit, Scopa, the Scorpions and the Public Protector, among other institutions.

When opposition parties asked if the report of the Joint Investigating Team (JIT) had been substantially changed after the Auditor-General showed it to the President, the President accused us of racism.

Yet the evidence has now emerged that the draft JIT report indeed went through major changes, contrary to what both the President and the Auditor-General said. Clearly, the government believes that there is one law for the ANC elite, and another law for everyone else. The President seemed to confirm that when he pardoned Dr Allan Boesak, who has never expressed remorse for stealing from the poor or even admitted his guilt.

Certainly the President has the constitutional power to pardon whomever he wishes. Yet he also has a political responsibility to take the people of South Africa into his confidence.

As Judge Dennis Davis of the Cape High Court said:
“I’m not saying the President can’t pardon people, and if he wanted to pardon Allan Boesak I understand that, but these are debatable questions, and they can’t be debated if there’s no openness”.

We are left to wonder whether the President is clearing the way for pardons for other disgraced ANC leaders like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Conclusion
And so, once again, we return to the fundamental question: what is the state of our nation?
The answer remains: the nation is strong; the state is the problem.

The more the government tries to expand state control and close down debate, the less it delivers to the people and the weaker our democracy becomes.

South Africa must choose a different path. We must choose smaller government and bigger individuals.

We must choose empowerment for the many instead of the few.

We must choose freedom and opportunity instead of state power and control.

These are the choices that the DA stands for. When the ANC shouts “amandla – awethu”, we will reply: “inkululeko – yeyethu”.

For freedom must always be a higher value than power.

We are not afraid of being called names, or being in the political minority, for now.

Some of us in the DA were in the political minority in the white community in the 1983 referendum on the Tricameral Parliament. We opposed it because it excluded black South Africans.

We only represented thirty-four percent of the vote at the time. But our stance has proved to be one hundred percent correct.

So we will continue to stand for what we believe in.

We will continue to promote our vision of an Open Opportunity Society that is uniquely South African; in which every person is free, secure and equal before the law; and in which every person has the means to improve the quality of his life and pursue her own aspirations.

We will continue to defend the Constitution. And we will reject the politics of co-option and capitulation that has turned so many other parties in this House into mere relics and shells.

In closing, I wish to reiterate my challenge to the President and the government to participate in six debates in Parliament this year that will take up the issues that the government identified as the most ripe for debate in South Africa.

In our differences and diverse opinions, we make South Africa stronger.

As the novelist Tom Robbins reminds us: “Doubt is a very positive emotion; certainty the enemy of freedom”. Our nation cannot make the right choices without a free, open and inclusive debate.

Today and tomorrow, we must choose the path of freedom.

For freedom is the only guarantee of prosperity for the poor.

And freedom is the only foundation worthy of South Africa’s great future.

I thank you.