State Of The Nation Address Of The President Of South Africa, Thabo
Mbeki: Houses Of Parliament
Cape Town

Madame Speaker
Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces
Deputy Speaker and Deputy Chairperson of the National Houses of
Parliament
Deputy President of the Republic
Honourable leaders of our political parties and Honourable Members of
Parliament
Ministers and Deputy Ministers
Our esteemed Chief Justice and members of the Judiciary
Heads of our Security Services
Governor of the Reserve Bank
Distinguished Premiers of our Provinces
Mayors and leaders in our system of local government
Our honoured traditional leaders
Heads of the state organs supporting our democratic system
Directors-General and other leaders of the public service
President Mandela and Mrs Graca Machel
President FW de Klerk and Mrs de Klerk
Your Excellencies, Ambassadors and High Commissioners
Distinguished guests, friends and comrades
People of South Africa.


I am honoured to welcome to this Chamber representatives of two
families whose loved ones were killed 30 years ago in Gaborone,
Botswana, and Lusaka, Zambia, while opening what proved to be parcel
bombs sent by agents of the apartheid system. These were Onkgopotse
Tiro, a leader of the South African Students Organisation (SASO), and
Adolphus Mvemve then Chief Representative of the ANC in Zambia. I am
very pleased that they were able to join us today.


Nelson Mandela delivered our first State of the Nation Address before
the first democratically elected parliament on the 24th of May, 1994.
In that Address he quoted from a poem by Ingrid Jonker.

In that poem Ingrid Jonker said:

"the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving the child
peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who only wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere

the child grown to a man treks on through all Africa the child grown
to a giant journeys over the whole world without a pass!"

Nelson Mandela then went on to say:

"And in this glorious vision, she instructs that our endeavours must
be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and
the liberty of the child.

"It is these things that we must achieve to give meaning to our
presence in this chamber and to give purpose to our occupancy of the
seat of government.

"And so we must, constrained by and yet regardless of the accumulated
effect of our historical burdens, seize the time to define for
ourselves what we want to make of our shared destiny.

"The government I have the honour to lead and I dare say the masses
who elected us to serve in this role, are inspired by the single
vision of creating a people-centred society.

"Accordingly, the purpose that will drive this government shall be
the expansion of the frontiers of human fulfilment, the continuous
extension of the frontiers of freedom.

"The acid test of the legitimacy of the programmes we elaborate, the
government institutions we create, the legislation we adopt, must be
whether they serve these objectives."

Today we begin the last session of our Second Democratic Parliament.
We begin this session two-and-half months before we celebrate our
First Decade of Liberation and Democracy. We also meet in these
Houses of Parliament not long before we hold our third general
elections.

It is therefore natural that our national legislature should spend
some time reflecting on what we have achieved and not achieved during
the last ten years. Inevitably, all of us will also make speeches
aimed at improving our fortunes in the forthcoming elections.

But perhaps the correct starting point for the government would be to
recall what was said as we began our journey into our democratic
future. It was for this reason that I quoted what President Mandela
said at the start of the first session of the first democratic
parliament.

To repeat what he said:

"The government I have the honour to lead and I dare say the masses
who elected us to serve in this role, are inspired by the single
vision of creating a people-centred society.

"Accordingly, the purpose that will drive this government shall be
the expansion of the frontiers of human fulfilment, the continuous
extension of the frontiers of freedom.

"The acid test of the legitimacy of the programmes we elaborate, the
government institutions we create, the legislation we adopt, must be
whether they serve these objectives."

Sometimes it is difficult fully to understand the fact that we are
barely ten years away from a time in the lives of our people when our
collective future was very uncertain. Some among us will hardly
remember that even as we met in this House to listen to President
Mandela deliver the State of the Nation Address, fellow South
Africans were continuing to die as a result of political violence.

For instance, the South Africa Yearbook 1995 reported that "Although
political violence declined during and after the April 1994 election,
extensive criminal and political violence continued to persist in the
country, especially in KwaZulu-Natal and on the East Rand of the
Gauteng Province." Daily fatalities from political violence still
numbered six in May and just under four in June.

Others among us will have forgotten that as we sat here listening to
that first State of the Nation Address, the commitment made by
President Mandela, to ensure "the expansion of the frontiers of human
fulfilment" was to many little more than a promise they appreciated
but could not fully comprehend.

The question had still to be answered as to where the resources would
be found to finance the expansion of the frontiers of human
fulfilment, of which President Mandela spoke. In the decade up to the
middle of 1993, the average annual GDP growth rate was less than 1
per cent. During the first half of 1995, the annualised growth rate
stood at 1 per cent. For the fiscal year 1994/95, the budget deficit
stood at 6.6 per cent. Consumer price inflation in the 12 months up
to April 1995 was 11 per cent.

By the end of that year, the interest rate stood at 13 per cent. On
14th of February, 1995, the then Governor of the Reserve Bank, Chris
Stals, said: "A more restrictive monetary policy is needed to make
sure that the current economic upswing will not be of the boom-bust
nature of earlier times, but will be more durable."

On the 29th of June of the same year, Mr Stals sounded an ominous
note when he said: "Underlying inflationary pressures are undoubtedly
increasing again in the South African economy...If left unchecked,
this trend will eventually force the abortion of the welcome
improvement over the past year in real economic growth, and will
frustrate the objectives of the Reconstruction and Development
Programme."

On the 28th of August, 1995, Chris Stals said: "Basically, the South
African economy is not competitive enough to enable it to maintain an
economic growth rate at a level high enough for its own needs. More
drastic economic restructuring will be needed to lift the growth
potential of the economy to the desired and more acceptable level."

In the same speech, he expressed the uncertainties of the day when he
said: "Economic growth will, in the final situation, be dependent not
only on an improvement in the economic structure of the country, but
even more so on political and social stability. In the final
situation, all business decisions are influenced by the overall
environment in which they are taken."

On the 12th of October, 1995, he said that the country was still
faced with some political uncertainties, which impacted on our
economic prospects. He said:

"At this stage...the country still has to face:

* the first fully democratic election for local authorities scheduled
to take place in early November this year; * a more clear definition
of the political, economic and financial relationships between the
central government and regional governments; and, * the drafting of a
final Constitution to replace the current Interim Constitution before
the next general election can take place."

Since time immemorial, the overwhelming majority of our people had
known nothing but despair. They knew this as an incontestable matter
of fact that tomorrow would not be better than yesterday; it was also
fixed and given that the following day would be worse. But then,
April 27, 1994 came and things changed radically and irrevocably for
all South Africans.

For the black, and especially African majority, suddenly a new dawn
broke. After these masses had cast their votes, they still had
nothing in their stomachs and their pockets. They walked away from
the polling booths to return to their miserable shacks, their
children made listless by hunger and the brutish thugs who prowled
the unlit dirt roads of the shantytown, ready to pounce on their
victims with no sense of mercy.

They walked the long distances to return to their homesteads of rural
squalor, to the mornings of the drudgery of women with buckets full
of dirty river water on their heads, to the daily diet of mealie-pap,
to the dark, still and menacing nights broken only by the weak
flickering light of the paraffin lamp and the dying embers of an
exhausted fire on the humble hearth.

But yet they had a spring in their step because they knew that a new
dawn had proclaimed the coming of a bright day. Though their hands
carried the emptiness to which generations of deprivation had
accustomed them, their hearts and minds were fired up by a new-found
sense of hope and the attendant feeling of dread lest that hope
turned out to be but a mere mirage, the false creation of a wish that
was intensely felt.

The experience of many decades had taught us to understand that the
black poor of our country valued a just peace as deeply as they
valued their lives. It had taught us that their sense of pride in
themselves as human beings made it impossible for them to join in a
mass slaughter of other human beings, even to satisfy the base
instincts of vengeance and retaliating to settle scores.

Over many decades, we had seen that these masses would always refuse
to turn racist simply because they were subjected to cruel, racist
rule. When a hero in their midst, Chris Hani, was murdered in cold
blood, they refused to fulfil the prophesy of the poet that the blood-
dimmed tide would be loosed, to drown the ceremony of innocence.

They stood in the voting lines side by side with those who had been
their oppressors, and never uttered a single word of anger, nor
jostled their white person next to them because they felt that their
time to become the new masters had come. Black and white stood
together, acting voluntarily together for the first time in our
history, together to give birth to a new social order that would
serve the interests of all our people.

When the leadership of these black masses said to them that, despite
the fact that their children, their brothers and sisters, their
mothers and fathers had been slaughtered in Boipatong and elsewhere
on the many killing fields in our country, they as leaders, were
obliged to pursue the peaceful advance to a just peace, these masses
agreed and urged that the dialogue chamber should bring to the nation
the gift of a just peace.

They thought and acted as they did because they knew better than
those who had been certified as learned, that it was only a just
peace that would end their despair and bring into their lives the
sense of hope that would make it possible for them to bear the pain
of hunger, until the day came when they would no longer go hungry.

It was for these reasons that they had fought, ready to sacrifice
their lives, for the just peace and the sense of hope they saw as the
necessary condition for their survival as human beings. Those among
us who are fond of threatening violence to promote their causes,
should learn to know this, that the masses of our people are ready
and willing to sacrifice once again, to defend the peace and keep
alive the sense of hope that enables them to behave in mysteriously
miraculous ways.

I must presume that many of us read the moving article by Rian Malan
published last Sunday. He says:

"On this day, 10 years ago, I was hiding gold coins under floorboards
and trying to get my hands on a gun before the balloon went up. As a
white South African, I was fully expecting war as right-wing boers
and Bantustan chiefs conspired to annihilate Nelson Mandela's people
and the ANC leader squabbled with President FW de Klerk over who
deserved more credit for their shared Nobel Peace Prize.

"In my view, peace would never come. There was too much history, too
much pain and anger...

"Ten days before the predicted apocalypse, there came a miraculous
reprieve. A reverent quiet settled upon the nation, and the election
passed off entirely peacefully...

"I set out to discredit the outcome. The peace is illusory, I
sneered; anarchy is still coming. Look at crime! Rape! Guns and
mayhem! Decaying cities! Abandoned factories! Incompetence and
corruption everywhere! When our new rulers dismissed such criticism
as racist, I said, fine: if that's the price one pays for speaking
the truth, I will consider myself honoured and continue. Hospitals
don't work anymore! Surly nurses! Drunken teachers! A civil service
where the phones just ring!"

He ends his personal testimony with these words:

"It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if one is
arrogant and the gift is something big, like mercy or forgiveness.
The gift of 1994 was so huge that I choked on it and couldn't say
thank you. But I am not too proud to say it now."

I have borrowed these honest words from Rian Malan to tell the
painful story that strangely, but not surprisingly, because of April
27, 1994, our Freedom Day, despair had changed its domicile. Now,
because freedom for all our people had become the defining feature of
our reality, those who had rejoiced in the supremacy of their race
opened their doors to despair.

Those who had had despair imposed upon them, rejoiced in the triumph
of the angel of hope, that brought a new life of a shared
neighbourhood to all our people, no longer fractured by high,
fortified walls of hatred, fear and mistrust.

But this too, the transference of the burden of despair, became part
of the reality that the new democratic order had to address. It
became part of what had to be done to achieve what President Mandela
foretold, when he spoke from this podium about the expansion of the
frontiers of human fulfilment, and the continuous extension of the
frontiers of freedom.

Almost ten years after its liberation from white minority rule, our
country still faces many challenges. Many of our people are
unemployed. Many of our people continue to live in poverty. Violence
against the person in all its forms continues to plague especially
those sections of our population that are poor and live in socially
depressed communities.

The burden of disease impacting on our people, including AIDS,
continues to be a matter of serious concern, as do issues that relate
to the fact that many of our people, including the youth, lack the
education and skills that our economy and society needs.

There are still many of our people who live in shacks and others who
have no access to clean water, proper sanitation and electricity.
Imbalances and inequalities that impact on fellow citizens on the
basis of race, gender and geographic dispersal continue to persist.

In the 1994 State of the Nation Address to which we have referred,
President Mandela said: "We have learnt the lesson that our blemishes
speak of what all humanity should not do." The point we have sought
to make in the last few minutes in referring to the challenges we
continue to face, is that the blemishes of which Madiba spoke
continue to disfigure our society. We have not as yet eradicated the
cruel legacy we inherited that he characterised as the blemishes that
all humanity should avoid.

However, despite this reality, the answer we have given and will
continue to give to the question whether we have made progress with
regard to the fundamental tasks of which Nelson Mandela spoke on the
24th of May, 1994, is a resounding - yes!

Together with all other objective observers of social development, we
have always known that our country's blemishes produced by more than
three centuries of colonialism and apartheid could not be removed in
one decade. Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in saying that we
have made great advances to ensure the expansion of the frontiers of
human fulfilment, and the continuous extension of the frontiers of
the freedom, of which Nelson Mandela spoke almost ten years ago.

The statistics and concrete information of which the Honourable
Members, the distinguished guests and our country are familiar, tell
the real story of what we have done and had to do to create the
people-centred society that has been central to the work of both our
first and second democratic governments.

This real story is that before 1994:

* Estimates of the housing backlog ranged from 1,4 million to 3
million units and people living in shacks were between 5 million to
7,7 million; * 60% of the population of South Africa had no access to
electricity; * 16 million people had no access to clean water; * 22
million people did not have access to adequate sanitation; * There
were 17 fragmented departments of education with a disproportionate
allocation of resources to white schools; * There was 70% secondary
school enrolment.

A decade later:

* About 1,9 million housing subsidies have been provided and 1,6
million houses built for the poor of our country; * More than 70%
households have been electrified; * 9 million additional people now
have access to clean water; * 63% of households now have access to
sanitation; * There has been a successful formation of an integrated
education system, even though there is a clear need for more resource
allocation and capacity building in poor areas; * Nutrition and early
childhood interventions have been established to improve better
results for children from poor backgrounds; * By 2002 secondary
school enrolment had reached 85%.

Again, the real story of our country tells us that 10 years ago:

* South Africa was in its twenty-first year of double-digit
inflation; * The country had had three years of negative growth - the
economy and the wealth of the nation was shrinking; * South Africa
had experienced more than a decade of declining growth per capita -
the average income of South Africans had been falling since the
1980's and the overall wealth of the country declined by nearly one-
third; * From 1985 to the middle of 1994, total net capital outflow
from our country amounted to almost R50 billion. * Government had run
up a budget deficit equal to 9,5% of the GDP, including the debt of
the so-called independent homelands; * The net open forward position
of the South African Reserve Bank was $25 billion in deficit; *
Public sector debt was equal to 64% of the GDP.

It is this unhealthy economic situation that led Chris Stals to make
the observations to which we have referred.

A decade later:

* Inflation is down to four percent if you use the CPIX or less than
one percent if you use the CPI index; * The country is experiencing
the longest period of consistent positive growth since the GDP was
properly recorded in the 1940's; * The net open forward position of
the South African Reserve Bank rose to $4,7 billion in surplus by the
end of last year; * Public sector debt has come down to less than 50%
of GDP.

Since 2001, we have engaged our people in the various provinces in
the process of Izimbizo, the 7th and latest being KwaZulu-Natal. By
this means we have sought to deepen the interaction between the
national government and the masses of our people. The national
ministers, provincial and local governments have also carried out
their own imbizo campaigns for the same reason.

We have just presented some of the statistics that tell part of the
story of our progress during our first decade of freedom towards the
creation of a people-centred society. The imbizo process has given us
an excellent opportunity to hear directly from the people what these
figures mean to them.

It has been truly inspiring to hear directly from the people as they
expressed their concerns, communicated their aspirations and made
suggestions of what needs to be done to take us further forward to
meet the needs of the people.

These masses, essentially, but not exclusively, the poor of our
country, invariably speak well of the improvements to the quality of
their lives that have occurred during the last ten years. They talk
about the increased access to better housing, water, electricity,
roads, land, school meals and social grants. But these masses are
equally insistent about the need for all of us to act together to
address the outstanding challenges. Regularly they raise the issue of
the need for jobs and the need to provide appropriate training
especially for the youth to ensure that on completing their school
years, they are able to find employment. Like others of our rural
communities, rural KwaZulu-Natal called on the government to help
with the provision of tractors and seed to assist the people to till
the soil.

The people have not hesitated to make frank and critical assessments
especially of the quality of service delivery in their localities, as
well as the performance of the municipal councillors. They also
boldly raise other questions, such as crime, health matters and
instances of perceived or actual corruption and malpractice.

On Thursday last week we were at Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal. One of the
participants at the imbizo complained that though people had cellular
phones in this rural and mountainous area, they could not use them.
He explained that this was because the cellular phone companies had
not erected the necessary masts.

The staff of the President's Office immediately contacted Vodacom and
informed them of the complaint made at the imbizo. I am very pleased
to say that two days ago one of the local leaders at Msinga called to
say that the service providers had come to the area within hours, to
attend to the complaint. In less than a week, the people of Msinga
had been given the possibility to communicate among themselves and
with the rest of the country and the world by telephone.

We held our last imbizo in KwaZulu-Natal at Gamalakhe near Harding,
in the Ugu District Municipality. At this imbizo a local resident
drew our attention to instances of corruption in our prisons. He then
gave us details of his experience of this corruption.

We have passed these details to Judge Thabane Jali who heads the
Judicial Commission investigating malpractices in our correctional
system, and who, I understand, is also present in the Chamber. Again
I am pleased to say that within days of receiving this information,
Judge Jali has already instructed people assisting him in KwaZulu-
Natal to meet the complainant and follow up on his allegations.

I mention these two instances because they demonstrate both the
positive response by the public and private sectors to the call we
have made for all our people to work together in the spirit of
letsema to tackle the common problems facing our country and people,
and the fact that the government takes the imbizo process very
seriously and tries at all times to respond to the issues raised by
the people, within the context of availability of resources.

Again, I mention this because some in our country, for reasons best
known to themselves, seem very keen to criticise the government's
response to the iimbizo on false grounds. This happened recently when
ill-informed allegations were made about commitments we made to the
people of Bekkersdal in Gauteng.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank both Vodacom and Judge
Jali and express the hope that others will follow the excellent
example they have set for all of us.

But perhaps more striking than everything we have said so far about
the imbizo process has been the palpable sense of confidence among
the people in a better future for their country and themselves. This
goes together with the complete absence of any sense of distance or
alienation from the government they elected.

These masses attend the iimbizo confident of their right to
communicate directly with their government and certain that the
process presents them with a genuine opportunity to have their
concerns addressed. I have listened to our people boldly expressing
their views even in areas that not so long ago were paralysed by the
fear that to speak one's mind was to invite death.

This has said to me that we have moved forward most significantly
towards the realisation of the objective presented by President
Mandela when he committed us to the continuous extension of the
frontiers of freedom.

Most of us present here will remember that not so long ago, the
government and the state were to the masses of our people Public
Enemy No 1. Then, some thought that to advance the demand that the
people shall govern was mere rhetoric of politicians hungry for
power. Institutions that were the cause of our despair have today
become repositories of hope.

When we presented the State of the Nation Address to our second
democratic parliament on June 25, 1999, we spoke of "the enormity of
the challenge we face to succeed in creating the caring society we
have spoken of."

We said that "For this reason this is not a task that can be carried
out by the government alone. The challenge of the reconstruction and
development of our society into one which guarantees human dignity,
faces the entirety of our people.

"It is a national task that calls for the mobilisation of the whole
nation into united people's action, into a partnership with
government for progressive change and a better life for all, for a
common effort to build a winning nation.

"The Government therefore commits itself to work in a close
partnership with all our people, inspired by the call - Faranani! -to
ensure that we draw on the energy and genius of the nation to give
birth to something that will surely be new, good and beautiful."

The masses of our people, individuals and institutions, among whom
today we cited Judge Thabane Jali and Vodacom, are responding
magnificently to the call we repeat today and will repeat in future -
Faranani!

In a few months time, we will return to these Chambers to inaugurate
our third democratic parliament. Whoever will be President then will
deliver yet another State of the Nation Address. That will provide an
opportunity to address the more detailed issues on the government's
programme as well as matters that will be covered in the Budget
Speech and the Medium Term Revenue and Expenditure perspectives that
will support the government's actions as our country begins its
Second Decade of Democracy.

Today we present the longer-term perspective for the continued
transformation of our country that will and must be based on our
country's achievements during its First Decade of Liberation. In this
regard, we would like to restate this matter unequivocally that the
policies we required to translate what President Mandela said in May
1994 are firmly in place.

Accordingly, we do not foresee that there will be any need for new
and major policy initiatives. The task we will all face during the
decade ahead will be to ensure the vigorous implementation of these
policies, to create the winning people-centred society of which
Nelson Mandela spoke.

If I may say this, creating that winning nation must include greatly
improved organisation, management and performance by all the national
teams, Bafana Bafana, the Springboks, the Proteas and our athletics
teams.

The work we will do must move our country forward decisively towards
the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment in our country. We
must achieve further and visible advances with regard to the
improvement of the quality of life of all our people, affecting many
critical areas of social existence, including health, safety and
security, moral regeneration, social cohesion, opening the doors of
culture and education to all, and sport and recreation.

We will have to score new victories in the struggle to create an
egalitarian society, successfully addressing the important challenges
of persisting racial and gender inequalities, the disempowerment of
our youth and people with disabilities, and proper care for children
and the elderly.

We must ensure that our country and people are properly positioned
within the global community of nations, fully understanding and
responding to the diverse political, economic, social and
technological challenges of the process of globalisation. In this
regard, we will have to persist in the work we are doing towards the
regeneration of Africa and the construction of a new and more
equitable world order.

The advances we must record demand that we ensure that the public
sector discharges its responsibilities to our people as a critical
player in the process of the growth, reconstruction and development
of our country. In particular this will require that we further
strengthen our system of local government and ensure that the system
of traditional government plays the role ascribed to it in our
Constitution and legislation.

We must achieve greater progress with regard to the integration of
our system of governance, achieving seamless cooperation both within
and among all spheres of government. At the same time, we must
further consolidate the practice of creating public-private
partnerships and building government-civil society cooperation, to
ensure that we utilise our collective capacities to give further
impetus to the overall development and transformation of our country.

With regard to the public sector, I would like to take this
opportunity to salute and thank especially the cadre of public sector
managers and leaders that has emerged over the last decade, many of
whom are with us in this Chamber. The work they have done and are
doing has placed them at the very forefront of the historic processes
that are giving birth to a new society.

I have no hesitation in saying that they stand tall even among their
counterparts elsewhere in the world. We will continue to rely on them
to lead the state and parastatal machinery as we break new ground
towards the creation of a people-centred society.

As we enter our Second Decade of Liberation, we must continue to
build the sense of national unity, united action and the new
patriotism that have manifested themselves in our people's response
to the calls - faranani, masakhane, letsema and vuk'uzenzele! Working
together, in conditions of entrenched democracy, respect for human
rights, peace and stability, we must continue to produce the Good
News that has made our country a place of hope even for other people
in the rest of the world.

We already have the policies and programmes that will enable us to
translate all the strategic objectives we have just spoken of into a
material factor in achieving the goals of the expansion of the
frontiers of human fulfilment, and the continuous extension of the
frontiers of the freedom, of which Nelson Mandela spoke a decade ago.

We have already identified the challenges posed by the Second
Economy, which economy constitutes the structural manifestation of
poverty, underdevelopment and marginalisation in our country. We must
therefore move vigorously to implement all the programmes on which we
have agreed to ensure that we extricate all our people from the
social conditions that spell loss of human dignity.

These include the urban renewal and rural development programmes, the
expanded public works programme, the expansion of micro-credit and
small enterprises, the provision of adult basic education and modern
skills, and the development of the social and economic infrastructure.

This will also help us enormously to achieve the goals of non-racism,
non-sexism, balanced urban-rural development and social cohesion.

At the same time, we must continue to focus on the growth,
development and modernisation of the First Economy, to generate the
resources without which it will not be possible to confront the
challenges of the Second Economy. This is going to require further
and significant infrastructure investments, skills development,
scientific and technological research, development and expansion of
the knowledge economy, growth and modernisation of the manufacturing
and service sectors, deeper penetration of the global markets by our
products, increasing our savings levels, black economic empowerment
and the further expansion of small and medium enterprises.

We will have to focus on the implementation of the measures we have
identified to ensure that we achieve better value for the money spent
on social delivery. Among other things, our successes with regard to
both the First and Second Economies must create the conditions for us
to reduce the numbers of our people dependent on social grants.

This will increase the resources available for social expenditures
focused on investing in our people further to empower them to become
better activists for reconstruction and development, away from
trapping large numbers within the paradigm of poverty alleviation.

We will also have to ensure that the institutions and processes we
have established and instituted to give effect to the Constitutional
and practical requirement for co-operative governance function
effectively. We must also focus especially on raising skills levels
within the public sector, and ensure its managerial and technological
modernisation, driven by a clear understanding of the developmental
tasks of our democratic state.

We must be impatient with those in the public service who see
themselves as pen-pushers and guardians of rubber stamps, thieves
intent on self-enrichment, bureaucrats who think they have a right to
ignore the vision of Batho Pele, who come to work as late as
possible, work as little as possible and knock off as early as
possible.

We have also established institutions and processes to give effect to
our shared desire to mobilise all our people voluntarily to act
together to achieve the tasks of reconstruction and development.
Quite clearly, the sustained calls for all of us to respond to a new
patriotism have struck a chord among all our people, black and white,
with the exception of the most selfish and self-centred among us.

Needless to say, the further translation of the vision of faranani
into a powerful motive force for progressive change can only be
achieved within the context of the democratic, popular and open
participation of all our people, black and white, in determining our
shared destiny.

In this regard, I notice that the traditional doomsayers are back at
their favourite sport of trying to frighten us with scarecrows.
Seemingly, these have not achieved the maturity of a Rian Malan.
Instead, they are painting monstrous pictures of impending violence
during the forthcoming elections and radical constitutional
amendments after the elections, by the very people who drafted this
constitution.

The masses of our people sacrificed everything to achieve peace and
democracy for all of us. These masses will not allow that desperate
politicians do desperate things to win or retain power for themselves.

We are all perfectly aware of the tasks of the African Renaissance,
or should be. Together we have worked very hard to ensure that we
make the necessary progress with the challenges of the regeneration
of our continent. At the same time, we will still have to contribute
as much as we can to the common African effort to strengthen such
institutions as SADC, the African Union and NEPAD and help ensure
that they discharge their responsibilities effectively. We must do
this work driven by the conviction that we will not allow anything to
stand in our way towards the building of a peaceful, democratic and
prosperous Africa.

In this regard, I would like to pay tribute to the officers, men and
women of the South African National Defence Force who are doing
sterling work to help advance the cause of democracy and peace in
various parts of our continent. The new equipment they are receiving
will give them increased capacity to meet this and other obligations.

Other regions of the world, including the most developed countries,
are hard at work to change their neighbourhoods for the better. We
can only ignore or minimise this task with regard to ourselves at our
own peril, driven by a lingering sense that we are not an integral
part of the African continent. This we will no do.

All major current international developments emphasise the importance
of constructing a new world order that is more equitable and
responsive to the needs of the poor of the world, who constitute the
overwhelming majority of humanity.

The Iraq affair, the continuing and painful conflict involving Israel
and Palestine, the WTO failure at Cancun, the seeming paralysis
around issues relating to the democratisation of the UN and other
multilateral institutions, the dissonance between the process of
globalisation and a multilateral system of governance, the issue of
global terrorism - all these matters underline the importance of
moving forward significantly towards the building of the new world
order that has been spoken of, for a long time already.

We must stand ready to play our part in addressing this urgent
challenge, in our own interest.

During our Second Decade of Liberation, we will ensure that Freedom
Park is built and completed, together with other legacy projects that
celebrate our humanity, our commitment to the all-round emancipation
of all human beings, and human dignity.

A decade ago, Nelson Mandela said "The acid test of the legitimacy of
the programmes we elaborate, the government institutions we create,
the legislation we adopt, must be whether..." they help to create a
people-centred society, the expansion of the frontiers of human
fulfilment, and the continuous extension of the frontiers of freedom.

As we progress to the celebration of our First Decade of Liberation
and Democracy, I trust that the national, provincial and local
legislatures will give themselves the opportunity to answer the
question whether they have passed this acid test.

What I will say is that during this First Decade, we have made great
progress towards the achievement of the goals we enunciated as we
took the first steps as a newborn child. We also laid a strong
foundation to score even greater advances during the exciting and
challenging Second Decade ahead of us, as a people united to build a
better South Africa and a better world.

When he contemplated the advent of the end of the 20th century and
the beginning of the 21st, the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, wrote:

"The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks, these poor schools,
these people still in rags and tatters, this cloddish insecurity of
my poor families, is all this the day? The century's beginning, the
golden door?"

("The Men").

We have it within our power to build our own golden door into our
Second Decade of Liberation. We have demonstrated that we have the
will to answer the question in the affirmative, and say - yes, this
is the day!


Thank you.

Issued by: GCIS on behalf of The Presidency 6 February 2004