Pretoria, 5 June 2000
Ladies and gentlemen, in 1994 we stepped back from the brink of disaster and into the warm light of democracy - democracy in the sense that all South African adults, regardless of race, colour, creed, or the ability to read and write, were entitled (for the first time ever) to vote for the government of their choice. This was a huge leap forward for our country, but it was only the beginning.
Democracy is not built on ballot papers alone, democracy requires much deeper foundations, ones that will outlast differences of opinion, that will outlast political parties and heads of state, that will outlast many generations. This is the challenge that faces us now, as a young and developing nation: to entrench our democracy and make it real. This requires us, very profoundly, to transform both our state and our society.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing us, as a nation, is the eradication of poverty. Apartheid policies left South Africa with a great disparity in wealth and access to both services and natural resources. South Africa is a middle-income country, but a large proportion of the South African population are extremely poor, or vulnerable to poverty - women, and women-headed households make up a large proportion of the poorest and most vulnerable. The Gini co-efficient (which measures the level of income inequality in a country) of South Africa, until recently second only to Brazil, has now overtaken Brazil to put us as world leaders - an unpleasant leadership position and one we would hope to shake off.
There are a number of aspects to the huge task of poverty eradication, including: job creation; reduction of crime (which is necessary in order to achieve poverty eradication, but which will also follow as a result of it); redistribution of access to natural resources such as land and water; education, and the conscious removal of discrimination against marginalised groups such as women, particularly black, rural women.
To achieve this, we have had to, and continue to have to, transform our policies, our legislation, our government departments, our way of doing things, and our society as a whole.
Before I reflect on what we have achieved or learned in the water and education sectors, it is appropriate to spend a few minutes on what one understands by the state, and the role of the state. For the purposes of this address, I will be using the term state to refer, in essence, to government departments, separate from and different to the political leadership of the country as represented by Cabinet and the ruling party.
This is a separation that I believe is important in the South African context for a number of reasons. The most important of these is that there is still, in South Africa, a disjuncture between political and state power. There are, for example, still many elements in government departments that neither embrace nor understand our new dispensation. The state is a terrain of contest. This contest can result in the state showing the same dominant forces as in the ruling party or showing dominant forces contradictory to those of the ruling party. This means that the state can either support or undermine the implementation of government policies.
We must be very clear that the state is not race, class or gender neutral. Societal conflicts of race, gender and class are manifested in the state as well. These tensions are particularly prevalent in the South African context, not only because of the racist and sexist history of the South African state, but also because the ruling party, the ANC, while it wields political power, does not control the economic power of the country. There is thus a tension between the ruling party and the economically dominant class, a tension, which is reflected inside the state.
The education system is fundamental to the transformation of society. Linked to this is the ability or willingness of the state to deliver an appropriate education system. For example, are we delivering an education system which is entrenching the privileged mindset of a few, while training others less fortunate to believe that they are destined, like their parents, to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water". Or are we delivering an education system that is liberating the true potential of our youth, regardless of whether they come from Sandton or Orange Farm.
We inherited an education sector, which was structured along racial rather than rational lines. Our first task was to realign 14 racially based education departments to 9 geographically organised provincial departments. This was not a simple task because salary structures and deployment ratios had to be addressed. As a result as much as 93% of provincial education budgets is spent on salaries.
In the primary and secondary school sector we then set about reviewing our rule-based examination driven syllabus, which resulted in our adoption of, out-comes based education and a new curriculum. Our first experiences has shown that teachers and concerned parents were excited by the prospect of out-comes based education. This remains the case. However our new curriculum once put into practice proved to be somewhat more complex than we were in a position to deal with.
The Review Committee on Curriculum 2005, comprised of leading educationalists and led by Professor Chisholm, unanimously recommended that C2005 should be modified and enhanced to improve the implementation of out-comes based education. In welcoming the Committee's recommendations government also signals its commitment to ongoing transformation and the willingness to make changes where these are necessary.
We are also ensuring the transformation of other sectors in education. Our tertiary sector was also racially based and as a result many universities, technikons and colleges are struggling to find their place in our new democracy. I will shortly receive proposals on the 'size and shape' of the higher education sector from the Council on Higher Education. In the second half of the year I will present Cabinet with proposals as to how we can strengthen the higher education system.
In the water sector, the subject of my previous portfolio, as elsewhere, the first challenge was to reform the policy and legislation governing access to and the management of water. Under the previous legal regime, around 12 million people did not have access to potable water, and access to raw water for agricultural purposes was tightly linked to access to land, and thus concentrated in the hands of a white minority with access to both political and economic power. It is only because we were a society undergoing profound political turmoil, a society in which powerful vested interests had lost their "hotline" to government, that we were able to introduce the National Water Act and remove the links between ownership of land and access to water. Elsewhere in the world such moves, which represent a fairly common sense approach to management of a scarce natural resource, have been blocked by the economic clout of those who currently have access to water.
Currently the new legislation is being implemented, and it is in the implementation that the tensions I referred to earlier become clear. I will return to these tensions in a moment. Let me first begin by saying that in the water sector, not only has a framework been laid that will facilitate the transformation of society, but that transformation has begun.
Since 1994 a combination of various government departments and spheres of government have brought safe drinking water to millions of people. At the same time, the National Water Act has begun the process of making water for productive uses available to previously disadvantaged groups - although this still has a long way to go.
The impact of a tap within 200 metres on the life of a woman who previously had to walk several kilometres to an unprotected spring or river is enormous, including the freeing up of her time for more productive activities and improved personal and family health. The mere provision of clean drinking water is not, however, fully transformative. The transformation of our society requires far more than the provision of relatively low levels of service. We must recognise, however, that without such infrastructural provision, transformation of our society will not take place.
As I mentioned, it is in the delivery of water services and the implementation of the National Water Act, that the tensions between state, government and society become apparent. As a result of the "sunset clause" many of the officials being used to implement the new approach are the same individuals that implemented the discriminatory and outdated legislation of the previous regime. Many of them have tried to adapt to the new approach. Some have not. Many within the water sector, have strong links to the white farming community, with whom they have worked for years, while they have little or any connection to black, emerging farmers. Such experiences must influence the decisions of even the most loyal officials - we are, after all, all human, and subject to the influences of emotions and complex loyalties.
At the same time, new blood has been brought into the civil service - new officials who bring with them inexperience in relation to civil service rules and regulations (which sometimes leads them into unnecessarily embarrassing situations), as well as a wide variety of understandings of our situation.
However, the fundamental lack of professional water sector skills amongst the black majority has meant that such entrants are often in the lower echelons, or less technical fields. Water resources management, water engineering, water services provision remain still largely the preserve of whites, and white men in particular. Without such people, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry would be significantly understaffed. On the other hand, human resources management, financial management, and corporate services in general have been transformed much more substantially with regard to the question of racial representivity.
The impacts of this could be significant. The progressive nature of the National Water Act is daily being interpreted and given concrete meaning by officials who are not necessarily in support of the fundamental principle of redistribution and equity. It is, at least in theory, possible for the progressive elements of the National Water Act to be thwarted either deliberately, or by default, as a result of the political and social orientation of those tasked with implementing it.
South Africa is thus caught in a difficult tension. The potential exists for the best intentions of the ruling party to be undermined by a combination of lack of appropriate skills and lack of support within the state. This in turn, undermines the ability of the government to transform society through the medium of the state.
The lack of capacity within the state has already induced the government to look more broadly to find the capacity to deliver services, whether it is housing, water, or education. It is as a result of this need that the private sector has been brought in to deliver water services to the rural poor - often through the contracting of large engineering companies. On a different level, international water companies have been angling to take over the delivery and management of water services at local government level - not without some resistance, from, inter alia, trade unions.
For some who have resisted the idea of so-called privatisation of water services, one of the major concerns is whether the involvement of international companies in the delivery of water services will enhance or limit the delivery of services to the poorest of the poor.
In the education sector, the government has not taken the route of employment of the private sector in order to deliver services. Provision of education is, after all, a key role of the state. At the same time, however, two parallel systems of education exist side by side - state education, and private education - the first trying to ensure that the most basic elements of education, teachers and textbooks, actually make it into the majority of schools on time; the second trying to find ways to survive now that government funding for private schools has been cut.
While is it not the intention of government to interfere with the private schools system, it does raise concerns about the ability of the government to "level the playing fields", since the historically privileged are able to buy their children a better education than that afforded by the state.
Similarly we recognise that private higher education institutions have a place in our society. This does not mean that we agree to the unregulated proliferation of private institutions often for purely financial reasons rather than good educational purpose.
Most countries have not opened up to foreign higher education providers but, in keeping with our democratic principles, we have allowed foreign providers access to our educational market provided that real educational needs that conform to the development needs of our country are being provided for.
The South African government has put considerable emphasis on gearing the state away from delivery to a minority elite, towards delivery to all, with a focus on the poorest of the poor. At the same time, we have been gearing the state to balance infrastructure development with human and community capacity building, as in the water services programme where delivery projects have a social component built into them.
Training and retraining of staff has been taking place in order to ensure a fit between human resources, competencies and delivery needs. The government has developed a more integrated approach to delivery of services, attempting, in this manner, to develop synergy between sectors and to improve the transformational impacts of delivery.
None of this has been easy, and none of it is completed. The transformation of the state will take many more years. However, we now have a much clearer understanding of the magnitude of the challenge that faces us. We understand, for example, that the delivery of water services by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry has only just kept ahead of population growth. We also still have a very clearly articulated political will to deliver to the poor of South Africa, and to transform our society to one based on justice and equity. It may take longer than we hoped, but we will not rest until we have achieved it.