_______________
(Premier’s Address – Ms I W Direko)
The HON
PREMIER, Ms I W DIREKO: Hon Speaker and Deputy Speaker,
hon Members of the Executive Council, hon Members of the Provincial
Legislature, people of the
As a glaring rainbow stubbornly paints the African
blue skies, so glaring and stubborn is the poverty that blights my people, it
makes me cry. Poverty, the legacy of
apartheid designed to inflict according to colour line. Oh! Rainbow nation, how can we forget as if
the past was fine? How can poverty
amongst blacks in Qwaqwa be an act of God?
Undoing this handwork of yesteryear we are striking that cord. Resolutely, confidently and single-minded we
are on track. Accelerating change for a
‘better life for all’ our people, we are on track.
We are on track to accelerating change in the
creation of a truly better life for all our people. We are confident that this Government is
responding to the overwhelming support all our people have displayed in the ANC
in the past general elections.
During this year we will continue to accelerate our
efforts to improve the lives of our people, through the implementation of
Government programmes that will give concrete meaning to accelerated change.
After 5 years of democratic rule, we can confidently
state that we are on track to overcome the overbearing legacy of apartheid
devastation in our Province.
The overwhelming confidence of all our people,
especially African people, in the ability of this Government to represent their
interests, will be repaid through our continued efforts to qualitatively
improve the lives of our people.
The goodwill of the people of this Province is the
most precious asset we all should cherish and indeed nurture. I am mindful of the reality of the existence
of racism, a legacy of apartheid we inherited.
We are not going to close our eyes to incidents and activities of racism
from any quarter in the
Since its inauguration in June last year, Government
has been determined to operate and discharge its responsibilities as a
collective. Working in a manner that
emphasizes collectivity clearly illustrates, on our part, a commitment to
maximum delivery of services to all our people.
We are determined to work in a manner that promotes
an integrated approach to how we execute our functions as Provincial Government. The recent Provincial Strategic Plan endorsed
by the Executive Council, is testimony to our unwavering commitment to a
co-ordinated and integrated approach on how we conduct our business in this
Province.
We sincerely believe that the unity, collective
leadership displayed thus far, is the necessary ingredient for the achievement
of all the goals we set ourselves in this second term of governance.
Last year in August, I made reference in this House,
that our commitment as Government is to implement programmes to improve
education in our Province. Educational
reform is a contentious and much debated issue in South Africa, and the
situation in our schools and classrooms elicits much attention in the media,
especially due to the low provincial pass rate of 42,1% in the 1999 matric
examinations.
Education requires of us to have faith and hope,
believing that we can and will make a difference. Education requires of us to be agents of
change and instruments of progress.
I believe that the partnership between parents,
teachers, learners and Government will empower and capacitate our educational
leaders, but above all, it will work like good yeast and have a ripple effect,
so that ultimately our entire education system will be permeated to the benefit
of our learners who, after all, are our the future and hope of our country.
The Department will have to use this year to set the
stage to ensure that all children of school going age are at school and our
schools are turned into areas where education and learning become our supreme
activities.
In June last year I said, if stationery and
textbooks were not delivered timeously to schools during this academic year,
heads would roll. I am happy to announce
that by
As far as farm schools are concerned, I wish to
express my appreciation to individual farmers who have signed contracts with
the Department of Education concerning farm schools on their land.
I take this opportunity to appeal to the Free State
Agricultural Union to rise to the occasion and facilitate the signing of the
agreement and urge some of its members, who closed schools, to sign
agreement. We need this partnership to
be visible. It is only through
partnership that we can make this Province tick.
This is the year of delivery in Education. It cannot and would not be business as usual
that our Province is at the bottom rung when it comes to matriculation
results. Those who do not perform must
know, I repeat, they must know that there is no place for them in the system.
During the International Year of Older Persons in
August last year, we committed ourselves to improving the conditions of
pensioners as part of restoring the dignity of our people as well as making
good our determination to better the quality of lives of our people.
An audit of all pension pay-points has been
concluded. This brought to light the
poor conditions under which pensioners receive their grants. Some of these facilities have no basic
infrastructure such as toilets, clean water and electricity. Up to 90% of
pay-points are overcrowded, some having to serve over 14 000 beneficiaries
paid-out at one point.
We have engaged the local authorities in the
decentralisation of these pay-points and some local authorities have responded
positively. It is in this spirit of
co-operative governance that we urge the co-operation of all local authorities
in the Province to honour our pensioners on the payday.
The decline of the moral fibre in society is a
concern for Government. We are
experiencing increasing incidents of rape, child abuse, and the abuse of
women. These attacks bear testimony to a
declining moral fibre of society. The
Life Skills Education programme has been developed to address this
challenge. This policy is aimed at the
restoration and rebuilding of social values.
The programme is targeted at children, youth, women and parents.
The plight of children continues to be our priority
as Government. To this effect the
Province will be establishing a ‘One Stop Youth Justice Centre’, the first of
its kind in the country, for youth in conflict with the Law.
This centre will provide young people in conflict
with the Law with the following services:
Reception, assessment and referral.
This service will be provided in partnership with all stakeholders in
the criminal justice system. The MEC for
Social Welfare will elaborate more on these programmes on the occasion of her
Budget Speech in this hon House.
We outlined to this hon House the difficulties of
eradicating the legacy of poverty in rural areas of the Province. To this effect, the
Certainly, we shoulder an overriding moral
obligation to ensure the alleviation of poverty for the majority of the people
in this Province. To facilitate an
integrated approach to poverty alleviation, the integrated rural development
strategy is absolutely essential. This
strategy essentially aims at promoting the productivity of commercial
agriculture and of industries and commerce in small towns and stimulating rural
development by mobilising a range of Government departments and
non-Governmental institutions to work together.
The respective hon MECs for Social Welfare and Agriculture will
elaborate on these programmes in this regard at a later stage in this House.
I am pleased to announce that the Province has
accessed funds from the Social Plan Fund, which is aimed at improving
municipalities that have been affected by large-scale job losses. The first
towns to qualify for this plan are Virginia, Hennenman and Odendaalsrus. Our Province has been allocated an amount of
R3 million from the Local Economic Development Fund as part of our poverty
alleviation strategy.
The intensification of Government efforts to
eradicate the scourge of HIV/AIDS will only be successful if we work in close
partnerships with key stakeholders. In
our Partnership against HIV/AIDS, and as we announced last year, Government is
hosting a conference on HIV/AIDS on the 26th and 27th of
this month. As Government we remain
committed to ensuring that public education campaigns do have an impact,
particularly that of changing behaviour patterns of all our people.
I am pleased to announce that at this Provincial
AIDS Conference, we will announce the names of members of the Provincial AIDS
Council. The men and women, youth and
old, disabled, rural and urban people will give meaning to the partnerships we
are forging in the fight against this merciless disease.
These people will champion our struggle against
HIV/AIDS. They will ensure, together
with all citizens of the Province, that we give hope to those affected by
HIV/AIDS. To those living with the
disease and to the orphans they will show our love, compassion and support.
In recognition of their responsibility in this area,
the Youth Commission, together with the Young Positive Living Ambassadors have
initiated an HIV/AIDS awareness programme for the youth across the Province.
During this year we pay particular attention to the
challenge of job creation. Consistent
with decisions made by Government, the public and private sectors have accepted
the responsibility of working in partnership with one another with regard to
job creation.
The decline in the gold industry has exacerbated the
unacceptably high levels of unemployment in our Province, and further sharpened
the huge levels of poverty prevalent in many of our communities.
Local Government is thus challenged, along with
other spheres of Government and in partnership with the private sector, NGOs
and community based organisations, to vigorously promote Local Economic
Development. It also goes without saying
that co-operation between and among municipalities will maximise their impact
on socio-economic development.
In co-operation with National Government, projects
in
We call upon all key stakeholders, local residents,
businesses and political parties, including traditional leaders, to co-operate
in stamping out the crisis some of the TLCs are facing. We are confident that the changes that are
being introduced, led by the demarcation of new boundaries, will have a
positive impact on our people.
I am pleased to announce that the Executive Council
of the
The
The Phakisa project is one of the important flagship
programmes of Government, aimed at stimulating economic development and job
creation through sport tourism. Since
Phakisa is a flagship programme, I would like to encourage and invite the
private sector to become partners in sport tourism in the
The Maluti/Drakensberg Development project, which
constitutes our partnership with international investors, will soon be taking
off the ground. This is our major
tourism initiative that will accelerate infrastructure and tourism development
in the
Very recently, we have started a project for women
in construction in the Province. This
project, a partnership of a multitude of sectors, the Government, businesses
and the NGOs, assembled a group of 100 women, the majority of whom are from
rural areas, to be trained in construction and related businesses. They are trained in various aspects of
building, carpentry and draughting.
I am certain that you will agree with me that it is
the concrete empowerment of women, through job creation, and the provision of
life skills for women. I wish to take
this opportunity to emphasize the importance and urgency we attach to job
creation.
Similarly we are encouraged by the accelerated
development of women farmers in our Province.
This year the
I make a call today that emerging farmers in this
Province cannot succeed without the help of the commercial farmers. We
congratulate the Milk Producers Organization for the help they have been
providing to emerging farmers through funding and capacity building so as to
develop into commercial farmers. That
type of support will go a very long way in alleviating conditions on the farms
- and the people in general - in the disadvantaged areas of Qwaqwa and Thaba
Nchu.
In the context of partnership, I would like to take
this opportunity to congratulate all stakeholders who made it possible for our
Y2K roll-over to be smooth and professionally managed by the Province. We thank all those involved, particularly
Public Servants, who sacrificed their time to ensure that we experienced no
major problems in the transitional period.
All our citizens need to be secured in the knowledge
that, as Government, we have made immeasurable strides in our fight against
crime. We have strengthened our
institutional mechanisms to deal with crime, in particular against the heinous
crime of violence against women and children.
Government is on track in efforts to contain crime
through an intelligence led and reliable crime prevention strategy in
partnership with business, local authorities and all citizens of the
Province. Whereas our communities have
displayed the willingness to work with the Police Service, we remain concerned
by the reports continuously raised regarding bad treatment based on racist
attitudes and practices by members of the SAPS toward ordinary people. As indicated, the essential transformation of
this service, to put Batho Pele -
simply means that we have to weed out all forms of racism and corruption that
exist in the SAPS.
How is it possible that Government can lose so much
property through theft and corruption?
We can only, but reach one conclusion, rogue and corrupt elements in our
Public Service, working with other corrupt security officials, are hell bent on
sabotaging Government efforts in crime prevention.
In Government's determination to weed out corrupt
elements within the Public Service, including those collaborating with people
from outside the service, I am confidently and certainly informing you all,
that arrests are imminent.
You can rest assured that we shall be merciless in
dealing with corrupt people as we discover them! But I must hasten to acknowledge that there
are good officers both in the police and even in the Public Service who put the
interests of their people first. In
conjunction with those communities they so proudly served, we encourage them to
expose corruption wherever it exists.
In a few months we will be holding our Local
Government elections. Our leaders at the
Local Government level are faced with the objective problems of skewed
budgeting and infrastructure backlogs.
In rural areas in particular, Local Government leaders are confronted
with unresolved poverty levels and a lack of development. The fact that these problems are often
accompanied by instances of weak management, lack of accountability,
self-enrichment and ivory tower mentalities, compound our problems.
We urge all in the Public Service to render their
support, as they did during the National elections, to ensure the success of
the forthcoming Local Government elections.
Despite the setback of the increased carnage on our
roads over the festive season and the budgetary constraints, we are still on
track to achieve a minimum of 10% reduction of road accidents in the
Province. However, all of us will have to
support this initiative.
In pursuit of all this, we will operate in
collaboration with TLCs and the National Department, because the experience of
Arrive Alive has taught us that such a partnership can deliver. Recently our road infrastructure has deteriorated
at a fast rate and the recent rainfalls, welcomed as they are, have compounded
the problem further. This problem
affects all of us - farmers, rural and urban areas as well as the business
community.
We have decided to establish a Road Infrastructure
Fund whose immediate concern is to attend to the Ficksburg/Clocolan, and
Welkom/Odendaalsrus roads and all the secondary roads in the Province.
As part of our commitment to the re-structuring of
State assets, I am pleased to announce that the Maluti Bus tender will go out
for public tender later this month. We
hope that the restructured Maluti Bus Service will bring an improvement in the
lives of our people in Qwaqwa and the
We wish to re-iterate what we said at the Opening of
the Legislature in August of last year:
Corruption of whatever form in the Public Service will be dealt with
mercilessly. The arrest, jailing and
suspensions of corrupt Public Servants bears testimony to the statement that we
have adopted a zero tolerance approach to corruption.
Hon Members of the Executive Council will in due
course elaborate on the programmes essential to the fulfillment of our mandate
to the people of this Province. I would
like to take this opportunity to congratulate hon Members of the Executive Council
and the Legislature for the tireless work they have done in the last seven
months, and indeed say that we would not have expected anything less from all
of them.
We are on track!
We are on track to ensuring that we build a unified
We are on track in ensuring that we are in constant
contact with our people. This will be achieved through, amongst other things,
the rotation of the Executive Council meetings in the various areas of the
Province, to ensure effective constituency work among all sectors of our
communities whether they be black, white or green.
We
are on track to an era of the African century that declares war on mediocrity
in how we do our work. We are on track
to accelerate the pace of delivery.
Backward never, forward ever!
[Applause]