Issued by: Ministry for Post, Telecommunications and B/casting
New Delhi, 7 December, 1998
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Two villages, tens of thousands of kilometres apart, capture so much of our history in the 20th Century.
One is in Qunu, in the beautiful rural setting of Transkei in the Eastern Cape of South Africa; the other - Porbandar - in the deep rural areas of Gujarat.
In both villages, the beauty underlies great poverty and underdevelopment. Yet the social fabric of these two communities, steeped in the richness of generations of accumulated wisdom, have produced two of the most outstanding moral authorities of our century.
One is Nelson Mandela, from Qunu, widely acknowledge today across the world as a beacon of hope, compassion and greatness. The other is Mahatma Gandhi, revered as a leader of spiritual greatness and humility.
Both are characterised by a stubborn determination to set their people free. Both have suffered great injustice at the hands of colonial and racist oppressors. Both have cherished the hope of a nation, a world freed from the shackles of victimisation, the passion of unbridled materialism and the destructive obsession of power hungry elites.
Both have paid heavily for the path they chose, Nelson Mandela cloistered in a tiny prison cell for 27 years and Mahatma Gandhi paid the ultimate sacrifice at the hands of an assassin.
Our histories are shared, our vision fused and our futures is interconnected by forces greater than we can understand. We are two countries, in two continents, whose history is profoundly deep.
Africa is the home to "Homo Sapiens". This week we will announce the discovery of humankind's most distant ancestors. Remains of an almost complete skeleton dating back three million years have been discovered in South Africa.
We marvel at the wonders of the science, medical and philosophical wealth of the royal court of Timbuktu in the 16th Century. We celebrate the ancient civilisation of the Egyptian and Nubians as we discover that the scientific genius of the pyramids thousands of years old which shelter artistic treasures of unsurpassed beauty. We celebrate the great wonders of the Zimbabwean civilisation and discover the rock painting of the San and Khol of South Africa.
Across the expanse of the Indian Ocean, we gaze in wonderment at the achievements of early Indian civilisation. The precision, architecture and urban planning of towns such as Mahenjo Daro and Harappa that spanned the Great Indus River. We celebrate the profundity of the Rig Veda and the discovery of Indic Saraswati scripts during the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd Century BC.
A common threat that weaves through our social fabric is a deep spirituality and value system based on compassion, honesty, devotion, peace and the development of our communities. There was respect of the wisdom of our elders. There was humility in our pursuit of service. There was harmony in our relationship with Nature.
Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi represent the spiritual lodestar of this century. The challenge is whether we will be guided by their vision? The critical challenge we face at the dawn of the next 1 000 years is what legacy will we bequeath to our future generations?
Reflecting on the past decades, we can be justly proud at the progress humanity has made in science and technology. We have launched Yuri Gagarin into outerspace. We have landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. We have sent a remote mission to plant Mars and the Pathfinder scoured its surface, and today's newspapers applaud the construction of a multi-national space station. The world's knowledge is available at the tip of a finger of a computer keyboard.
We are in the throes of a revolution, a technological revolution, a digital revolution. The World Wide Web connecting millions of databases is driving a knowledge revolution. The creation of information, its packaging into services and its distribution are seen as the centre of wealth creation in the 21st Century.
Globalisation has created a global village, without borders and interconnected. However, the paradigm of the world economy continues to reflect inequality. The development gap between North and South, developed and developing countries, between the information rich and the information poor, men and women and urban and rural is widening.
In a world where the crisis is one part no matter how remote, is transmitted instantaneously to other parts of the world, no physical barriers can restrict the flow of information. But can we continue the course in which wealth creation and accumulation that deprives the greater part of humanity no access except to a future of poverty and underdevelopment? Can we bequeath a viable legacy to the future when four billion people have no access to a telephone line? Can we laud the achievements of the information revolution when unseen forces wreak havoc on our financial markets and throw thousands of honest entrepreneurs and millions of hardworking workers into our crowded streets in Delhi, Jakarta, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo?
However, we need to caution against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are many positive elements of our modernisation. Our challenge is universal access. Our challenge is to harness the power of modern science and technology to level the playing fields, to leapfrog our nations into the 21st Century.
India today is reputably the third biggest IT power in the world. It is the biggest exporter of programming skills in the world. You area a leader in the field; your market is potentially one of the biggest in the world. Yet your country, like ours, does not reflect the sophisticated services available to consumers in the developed North.
South Africa, emerging from three centuries of colonial neglect and apartheid racism has sough in the past four years to extend universal access and build a networked society.
We have introduced a three-tier separation of power with government concentrating on developing a national policy framework, an independent regulator responsible for licensing and controlling the frequency spectrum and preparing the ground for fair competition amongst a multiplicity of operators.
We have introduced private sector partnerships in the form of Malaysia Telecom and Southwestern Bell Corporation, USA, into our national telephone operator Telkom.
We have committed them to one of the most rigorous rollouts in the world. Over the next five years, every village, school, clinic, community centre, post office and police station will be connected to a digital, fibre optic, highspeed, broadband backbone in the country. Three million new digital lines have to be built and infrastructure spending reaching R50 Billion over this period.
This spending has already had a multiplier effect across the economy with the information industry growth in revenues and new listings on the Stock Exchange higher than any other sector of the economy.
To deal with the growth of the cellular industry with 2,5 million users between two operators, Government has announced its intention to license two further operators. Our goal is to lower the costs of entry, the costs of service and improve the quality of service while compelling the establishment of a modern communication infrastructure.
In recognising the convergence of voice, data and video on the networks, Government has moved rapidly to liberalise the broadcasting market. Our goal is to consolidate the freedom of the airwaves and to move from the notion of state broadcasting to public broadcasting, and introducing private sector investment. We believe this is crucial to deal with the overwhelming flood of foreign programming that is driving the world towards a unilingual and unicultural future that will threaten the very survival of the rich multicultural diversity of our country and our world.
As countries of the South, we sit on a goldmine of our cultural diversity that can be developed and exported to the world. Today, India and South Africa function as the economic hubs of our respective regions. In Africa, we face the great challenge of building a modern communications infrastructure.
Earlier this year, I convened a meeting of African ministers of telecommunications, and we agreed on a framework to build the communications infrastructure across the continent. Already, the Pan African Telecommunications Union - with 44 member countries - has adopted The African Connection as we call this plan, as its focus of activities for the next five years.
We have identified five pillars in this framework:
South Africa is the gateway into Africa as much as India is the gateway into the Indian sub-continent. We can gain tremendously from a mutual co-operation and partnership.
We are natural strategic allied united by a common struggle against injustice and oppression. The powerful emotional and spiritual bonds of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi unite us. A shared history, culture and leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement bind us.
Our private entrepreneurs, our religious organisations, our civil society organisations need to be unified in the search for an enlightened path towards social progress and economic development. Importantly we need to balance the spiritual needs of our people with the material aspirations. There is a sense of urgency to deal with the poverty and abuse our people face in their daily lives.
We need pioneers that are able to move beyond their traditional confines of their vision and to grasp the mantle of leadership to make the world a better place for all its citizens.
It is my fervent hope that our compass moves from the scenic beauty of the Cape Point to the splendor of snow-capped Himalayas, from the steamy shores of Durban to the beautiful beaches in the Bay of Bengal, we shall see the partnership of the African Lion and the Indian Tiger. This sacred bond can offer the masses of humanity a better future to look forward to.
And as we step past the dawn into the new Millennium, I can think of no more fitting tribute to two great patriots of our countries and of humanity Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.
I thank you.