Date: 27/04/2007

Source: KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government

Title: Ndebele: Freedom Day Celebrations

Speech by the honourable Premier of KwaZulu-Natal Mr S J Ndebele during Freedom Day Celebrations, Entumeni, Eshowe

Since 1995 we have been celebrating 27 April, the day on which South Africa was liberated from the shackles of apartheid. This is now the 12th year we are commemorating this important day. This is a day on which the masses of our people in 1994 stood in long lines to vote in a democratic government. This is an image we must never banish from our minds.

We have adopted an advanced Constitution which includes a Bill of Rights and represents a significant collective advance on apartheid. In tune with this forward-looking orientation, this year's theme for Freedom Day is "Renewing our pledge a national partnership to build a better life for all!" This is close to our own theme as the Provincial Government which is "Building the Economy through Partnerships".

Both these themes evoke the national partnership, which broke the back of apartheid and brought about our freedom and democracy. It is critical to sustain the idea of a partnership and the role of the collective because we could not have earned the victory we did without the role of all our people, black and white.

It is also critical every year to recall that Freedom Day was possible only after thousands of our people had died at the hands of the ever-present apartheid machinery in South Africa and different parts of the world. Often those who died were our best people. They were cadres who were prepared to pay the ultimate sacrifice and who risked the prospect of spending time in jail without knowing when they would come out. We must therefore look back in order to ensure that we do not ever return to that place where the rights of the majority were ignored in favour of a minority. As former President Nelson Mandela has reminded us, "Never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land shall again experience the oppression of one by another."

In his State of the Nation address earlier this year, President Thabo Mbeki urged all South Africans to take part in "building social cohesion and promoting a sense of belonging, thereby reinforcing the glue that binds the South African nation together". President Mbeki said, Freedom Day was no ordinary celebration, "It is a day when all of us need to pause and reflect on our past, to remember the heroes and heroines who brought us freedom, those whose sacrifices made it possible for all South Africans, black and white, to enjoy the benefits of democracy and for all of us to prosper in conditions of peace and stability".

Freedom Day must therefore also look at what it is that government and the people of South Africa have done to better the conditions of our people. We must make apartheid history by ensuring we improve the socio-economic conditions of our townships and rural areas. We must make apartheid history by improving the standards of our people in the informal settlements which surround our cities. That is why we have placed slum clearance and the revitalisation of inner cities economies at the top of our agenda. We must therefore use Freedom Day to gauge progress in the reconstruction and development of our country and province. In particular we need to know how we have built social cohesion and accelerated shared economic growth.

In KwaZulu-Natal we have declared 2007 the Year of Luthuli. We have done this because we are paying tribute to one of the sons of KwaZulu-Natal, Inkosi Albert Luthuli. Inkosi Luthuli died 40 years ago. He was President General of the ANC and was the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Chief Luthuli's legacy remains etched in the collective memories of all who cherish the democratic ideal. Our people remain part of our great dream today. In his political and personal life Chief Luthuli embodied the South African dream. This dream is the hope for freedom that kept many of us alive in times of great personal challenges. The dream lies in the building of one united, non-racial and non-sexist country out of racially disparate groups plagued by notions of racial and patriarchal superiority.

The South African dream is also the dream of Africa. It is that of the African Renaissance. The African Renaissance dusts out of the quagmire of colonial wastage, a continent that can stand tall and assume its rightful place in the world. Chief Luthuli gave us the best qualities we require in leadership today. Those qualities include honesty, integrity hard work and dedication to nation building. We have therefore taken these characteristics to our own public service by adopting the principle of Batho Pele, people first. This is an important principle which places all our people at the centre of our development programmes.

It is important that we build the physical and spatial environment for our people to live such as houses, hospitals, schools, roads, social and economic infrastructure. But we believe that building the moral base of the community will ensure that we have a citizenry which values itself, respects its fellow human beings and the country and province. That is why the Citizens Charter seeks to commit our people to the highest moral values to which Inkosi Luthuli subscribed and lived by.

Chief Albert Luthuli was President General of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1952 till his death in 1967. During his tenure, the 1950s witnessed the historic process of the independence of Africans from colonialism and the rollback of the outcomes produced by the European Scramble for Africa. The Suez crisis of 1956 was an indication that the gunboat diplomacy of a previous era was no longer an option for the Western powers.

The independence of Africa gathered momentum, when first Ghana became free in 1957, then Guinea in 1958 and subsequently a number of African countries gained their independence. Apartheid was tightening its grip eventually forcing legitimate people organisations to have no option but to take up arms against the state. This year, in 2007, as a member of the African Union (UN) Security Council we have taken our place alongside the nations of the world. We have come very far indeed.

When we had the chance, we chose a non-racial and non-sexist South Africa. This is a legacy of Inkosi Luthuli's leadership. As early as 1962 in a joint statement with Dr King, Chief Luthuli called for economic and arms sanctions against South Africa in the light of Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 1957. The statement drew a picture of possible outcomes in the event that a peaceful solution was not found to apartheid. The two leaders offered a simple solution when they declared, "So there exists another alternative and the only solution which represents sanity, transition to a society based upon equality for all without regard to colour."

Inkosi Luthuli used his moral authority in the world and his position as President General of the ANC to pave the road towards the peaceful resolution of the political impasse in apartheid South Africa. We must on Freedom Day remember the legacy that Inkosi Luthuli left us by being true to the values that he stood for. Former President Nelson Mandela, himself a Nobel Laureate, described Luthuli as a "colossus" and "foot soldier of our people who chose persecution and taught us the lesson that real leaders must be ready to sacrifice all for the freedom of their people."

Current challenges:
As the MEC for Health Ms P Nkonyeni said in her budget speech this week we are a province of more than 10 million people of which more than 88 percent are uninsured and do not have access to medical aid. We are also going through an HIV/Aids epidemic which is complicated by the advent of the deadly multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extreme drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB).

To be able to deal effectively with these challenges it is important that we adopt a comprehensive plan. In line with these goals, South Africa has developed its own mandate, MEC Dr Zweli Mkhize rightly declared in the Budget speech this year that we have the following targets:
* by 2008, all households will have access to clean water
* by 2010, all households will have decent sanitation facilities
* by 2012, every household will have access to electricity and
* by 2014, 30 percent of white-owned agricultural land will be distributed for sustainable agricultural development.

All these strategic goals will be sustainable if we have an economy that grows at a consistently high rate than we are currently doing. The national target for growth is six percent, we have set ourselves a target of at least eight percent growth from 2010 to 2014 and to halve unemployment by 2014. We are on track to achieve these targets. We have also identified the following sectors to drive growth in the province:
* agriculture and agri-industry (including land utilisation mapping and giving particular attention to land reform)
* industry, including heavy and light industry and manufacturing
* tourism, including domestic and foreign tourism
* services sector, including financial, social, transport, retail and government.

Very few economies in the world have ever moved from stagnation to overdrive without the injection of Foreign Direct Investment. We believe as the Treasury figures indicate, that we are also on the right track. For example:
* Transnet and the National Ports Authority will invest R15 billion in upgrading the capacity of Durban Harbour over the next five years
* Toyota Motor Corporation - R3.4 billion during 2004/2005
* Anglo American Plc investment in Mondi - R1.4 billion
* Shell and BP in Sapref in Durban - R630 million.

We hope that through this programme we will also recall Chief Luthuli's call that those who sacrificed, need to be rewarded by the commitment of those who benefit from the liberation of this country. Inkosi Luthuli could have been speaking of 27 April when he said: "It is a day of dedication because Africans, remembering the past and bearing in mind their duty to the future, dedicate themselves afresh to work for the objectives for which they made the supreme sacrifice. Not for nothing did they do it, should be our watchword." Not for nothing did millions vote for the first time in 1994, not for nothing did Nelson Mandela spend 27 years behind bars, not for nothing did Albert Luthuli endure banning by the apartheid government. These are things we must always remember, because a nation that forgets its own history is a nation that will itself soon be forgotten. Happy Freedom Day.

I thank you.

Issued by: Office of the Premier, KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government
27 April 2007