SPEECH BY THE DEPUTY MINISTER IN THE PRESIDENCY, MR BUTI MANAMELA, ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESIDENCY BUDGET VOTE

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, PARLIAMENT OF SOUTH AFRICA, CAPE TOWN
4 MAY 2016

Speaker
President of the Republic of South Africa
Deputy President
Ministers and Deputy Ministers
Honourable members
Congratulations to the EFF for filling up Orlando Stadium

I

There is an old saying that it is easier to be in the opposition than it is to govern.

Governing imposes the complexities of changing the lives of our people whilst all the opposition has to shout is: It is wrong! It is unworkable! It betrays the electorate! It is hopes and dreams without plans and vision!

Consistently, when our parliament is called upon to provide collective leadership and think rationally on how we deal with natural disasters such as the most severe drought facing us in years; the carnage of road accidents such as the one that claimed seven lives of students from the University of Witwatersrand; externalities such as the 2008 global economic crises that have imposed unemployment and stagnated economic growth; increased food, electricity, transport and rental prices that millions of workers and the poor face on a daily basis in the face of price fixing and the pursuit of maximum profits; these are the challenges which when we are all required to act, the opposition finds itself wanting and that they can churn out their ‘electoral propaganda’ and set in motion their ‘Tweet Factories’, develop slogans and hashtags that offer no alternative hope to the people of our country except to hype up trends in the social media.

As you design marketing campaigns to influence voters and seek to rubbish the progress that was made over the last 22 years, we spend sleepless nights digging deep from our brain trust to design possible solutions that will grow our economy, increase jobs and reduce inequality.

As you fail to persuade the twitteratti to bring themselves out for a ‘mother of all marches’ to ‘peacefully’ or otherwise remove the President of the Republic, we build houses, open new schools, welcome new factories, tar new roads, build new train coaches, ordain metrobus services, induct new university and FET graduates, open new power stations, give more people water and electricity and provide a package of hope and fulfil dreams of young men and women who represents the future of this country.

The twenty two years of freedom we just celebrated and commemorated was not one only of successes in changing the lives of our people.

But we accept the reality of promises not met and pockets of failure which are confronted in the course of government. We fail, not because of lack of trying, but in the course of governance, whilst you have nothing to show except for reproducing the Election Manifesto of the ANC and presenting it in different accents.

What we will never do is to lie to the people that it will be easy, and to mask the truth about the weaknesses as though it is all but paradise; or to promise them that we can double their pensions when we know that the national fiscus is under pressure; or that we will fight corruption when some within your own ranks are accused of corruption and self-enrichment; or that we will fix potholes within 48 hours when this is only done in Clifton and not Khayelitsha or the Cape Flats. Twenty two years may not be enough to change the ugly legacy of apartheid, but twenty two years is good enough for having taught us the harsh lessons of governance, improved service delivery and rationality.

Maybe the leader of the opposition is right, that we need change, and we need it urgently. The change we need, at the next elections, is the change of the opposition who have dismally failed to put the needs, interests and aspirations of the people first and are here merely to raise disruptive procedural points and yawn empty populist rhetoric. So yes, South Africa will join us on August 3 and shout through the power of the Ballot: Yes, we need Change, Change of the Opposition!

If the ‘Leader of the Opposition’ dismally fails to submit coherent argument to the house and to the country on why this Budget Vote One should be rejected; or why the people should agree with him on why President Jazob Zuma should vacate office, perhaps we should agree with him: Yes, we ned Change, Change of the Opposition.

All that we have from the ‘Leader of the Opposition’ is insults such as ‘Voetsek President Zuma’, ‘You are a thief’, ‘You are a Looter’ which shows that the opposition has nothing substantive and qualitative in changing the lives of our people.

In fact, under your leadership of your party and that of the oppositon, what we have witnessed is the degneration of the DA whom, instead of opposing the ANC, want to compete with the EFF in a downward slope of weak ‘oppositionism’ that is only interested in replacing the EFF as an ‘swearing machine’.

No wonder, Azona Kube and his friends who attended the DA Manifesto rally and interviewed by Carrien du Plessis of the Mail and Guardian could only say that: We want a good leader who will change our envioroment, We love, (not Mmusi Maimane, whom they did not know from a bar of soap, not Lindiwe Mazibuko who is now reduded into writing from afar) but Helen Zille. This is the same as those in your benches who share Facebook postings of racists who wish for the return of Hendrick Verwoerd.

Being number 2 in parliament, and reducing yourself to competing with number 3 for number one is a shame and indeed, Azona is right, we need a leader who will bring change: We need change, A change of the Opposition. And maybe toysoldier, Hon. Julius Malema, is right, they are not fighting against ‘mickey mouse’ political parties but against the ANC. By the way, again, Congratulations to the EFF for filling up Orlando Stadium.

II

Statistics South Africa, in its recently released Social Profile of Youth 2009-2014 Report, reminded us of the challenges that young people still face notwithstanding the democratic and development gains that we have achieved as a nation. The report is a call for more to be done and more opportunities to be created, faster.

You have heard today how, faced with all these challenges, the opposition (that should be changed) were painstakingly trying to persuade all of you that this government cares not for its youth and that nothing is being done for their development. But nothing could be further from the truth.

In the past 2 financial years (2013/14 and 2014/15), government expenditure on youth programmes amounted to R6.3 billion. This figure does not represent governments entire fiscal spend on youth but only the resources ploughed into the Employment Tax Incentive, the Jobs Fund, the NARYSEC Programme, the IDC, the SEFA and the NYDA. This figure does not include the money spent on youth through the Expanded Public Works Programme and the Community Works Programme where the majority of participants are youth.

Neither does it include the money spent through NFSAS and the SETA’s. All of these are intervention that were introduced as a consequence of the different data sets from the StatsSA and also in consultation with young men and women.

The Youth Employment Accord was signed with government and its social partners in April 2013, and together, have resulted in significant improvement in employment creation and support for SMME’s.

- 433 000 new jobs for young people, representing 7% increase in overall youth employment;
- Youth employment increased in 8 provinces with Gauteng, Limpopo, Western Cape and North West recording the highest increases;
- 114,223 young people were in learnerships over the 2013/14 and 2014/15 period;
- 32,000 artisans completed their training over 2 years since 2013
- Labour Centres have placed 22, 546 youth in employment over the period of the YEA
- The City of Tshwane’s Tshepo Youth Employment Initiative provided 10,615 youth with entrepreneurship training and with technical training provided to 1,566 youth co-operative members
- Since the Youth Employment Accord, the NYDA has facilitated 2,421 youth enterprises through its Grant Programme
- The NYDA has created and sustained 11, 677 jobs over this period with a further 12,579 youth being placed in jobs
- The NYDA has provided over 2 million young people with career guidance information

Government across all its spheres have tried various approaches to the challenges of youth unemployment and empowerment with varied successes. The challenges of youth unemployment are complex and multi-faceted.

Our approaches and solutions must rise to the occasion. We cannot be blindly following the one idea Democratic Alliance with it’s so called “youth wage subsidy” silver bullet. As the ANC government, we do not face a poverty of ideas. That is why, South Africa will join us and say: Yes we need Change, Change of the opposition.

III

Once more, from the bottom of my heart, and in their absence from the chambers, I would like to Congratulate the EFF for filling up Orlando Stadium.

IV

The DA and those that ANC NEC member Zizi Kodwa refers to as the philosophers of Stadiumology joined a fanfare declaring the ANC manifesto rally a failure because there were visible empty seats and we did not achieve the 110 000 people we expected. We admit. We have been doing a lot of self-criticism and assessment of Nelson Mandela Metro.

We are now aware that even with the changes that the current Mayor have brought about, the people are still disaffected.

But I tell you now that we are going to deploy every cent we can garner and every volunteer at our disposal to go door-to-door, street-by-street, to every church, shebeen, funeral, shopping centre, township and informal settlement to engage with the people of Nelson Mandela and ensure that we retain that municipality.

But speaking of numbers, and stadiums, and once more in congratulating the EFF for having filled Orlando Stadium, the DA announced with much fanfare that they will be filling the 30 000 capacity Rand Stadium with 20 000 people, it didn’t make sense. The leader of the DA here, even declared that the launch will be the biggest in the history of the DA.

But when people were not coming to fill up the seats, when the reality struck Atholl Trollip that suburbia does not yield to his appetizing rhetoric of showing force to the ANC and would rather sip umbrella drinks in Melrose Arch than waste sunscreen listening to a politician whose fortunes are equal to a Chinese Fortune Cookie, he started laying blue sheets to cover their embarrassing empty sits and declare the stadium as full. Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.

As I said earlier, I come bearing gifts, and for Mr. Trollip and Hon. Maimane, some sheets for the empty seats you will have to fill after losing in the coming elections. But on a more serious note, the DA and its leader claims that they govern in 8 out of the 10 best performing municipalities.

This claim is right. But what they deliberately forget to mention is the fact that over the last 10 years many of these municipalities, according to both municipality.IQ and the Empowerdex run citydex, have always been in the Top 10. The lies of the DA forget that municipalities such as Overstrand, Stellenbosch, Saldana Bay, Mossel Bay, Knysna, Bitou and Drakenstein have always been top performing and were run by the ANC government before 2011.

This lies also duped Maria Seroka and Hendrick Mbatha of Gauteng who were there at the Rally and also interviewd by the Mail & Guardian. Mr. Mbatha declares that he will vote for the DA because ‘everywhere the DA is going there is no corruption and the DA is the only party that is the rainbow nation that old man Nelson Mandela was speaking of”. But of course this can only be true if you live in Gauteng, Limpopo or Eastern Cape far from the under-development of Mitchelle’s Plain, Danoon or Joe Slovo who can only smell the Cape Town gravy.

Here, they know that the DA is a party of white representation and white previlage, and represents everything that Nelson Mandela went to prison for. Here, they know that the representation of the DA in the Cape Town Metro, or in the provincial cabinet and even here is parliament, there is nothing rainbow about the DA but everything that shouts white representation and previlege.

If I had time, Mr. Mabasa, I would count for you and show you how white the DA rainbow is here in parliament. There are only three types of black people that the DA intergrates in their white rainbow nation. It is those that prove useful in their agenda of derailing the transformation of society and empowering black people economically, such as Herman Mashaba, whose new slogan is “Black man, you are on your own.

Or those whom they regard as acting against the ANC even in the course of duty, like Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng whom they did not trust until he ruled in their favour in the Constotutional Court. Or those who have passed on like Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani whom some regarded as a terrorist. I would not be perplexed if in the future the DA and rgeir ilk would tell the next president of the Republic how good President Jacob Zuma is and why we should build a monument for him.

But this is because, Mr. Mabasa, the DA does what Almicar Cabral said we should not do and I quote: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories”.

But what are the lies, and what are the easy victories? Both the Honourable Motau and the Honourable Maimane in different platforms have quoted statistics on how life is better in the Western Cape and in Cape Town and worse where the ANC governs. Lets take two items: Housing and sanitation.

If we look at housing delivery, for instance, In the Western Cape in 1996, 82% of the population already lived in formal houses, this declined to 80.2% by 2011. By comparison Gauteng, which experienced a 10% greater increase in population than the Western Cape in the same period, increased access to formal housing from 74.8% to 79.8%. Again, Tell nolies, Claim no easy Victories.

Clearly, by looking beyond just the current figure of people living in formal houses to what the situation was in 1996, we can see that Gauteng has performed far better in delivery of houses than the Western Cape.

This is further compounded by the fact that when the ANC governed the Western Cape the number of houses built increased every year. However when we look at the actual number of houses delivered in the Western Cape since the DA took over the government we see that the number of houses built has actually declined every year. In 2009/10, using a budget prepared by the ANC, 16 566 houses were built. This declined under the DA to 14 570 houses in 2010/11 and 11 065 houses in 2011/12. Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.

We can illustrate this with various other froms of service delivery. The provision of proper sanitation has become important political issue in the Western Cape.

Despite the propaganda that the leader of the opposition and DA as presented at their election Manifesto, the Western Cape at 91.6%, is not the province with the highest percentage of households with access to flush toilets. Gauteng holds this distinction with 96.3% of households having flush toilets, followed by North West province at 91.8%. Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.

When it comes changes in access to flush toilets over time, all the other provinces beat the Western Cape in the scale of delivery over the last 17 years. This is a result of the huge backlog inherited from apartheid and the amazing delivery of services in ANC ruled provinces since 1994.

For instance in the Eastern Cape in 1996, only 64% of households had access to flush toilets, whilst by 2011 80% had flush toilets, an increase of 16%! In Free State the figures are even more impressive rising from 70.5% to 89.9%, an increase of 19,4%.
In all of these, whe the DA and other opposition parties quotes the numbers from StatisticsSA, drunk from election fever, they would say that 10% of the population does not have flush toilets, but will never say that now compared in the past 90% of the population has acceess to flush toilets. Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.

V

Again, and swearing on my great grandfathers’ grave, and his one trick pony horse Alloysius, I congratulate the EFF for for filling up Orlando Stadium

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, one of the Members of Parliament, Julius Malema, told the world and all those who cared to listen that “we (his party, supposedly) will run out of patience very soon and we will remove this government through the barrel of a gun”. This is not the first time that the said MP has threatened the use of violence and the possible taking of lives to resolve political differences were multiple options are available. I am aware that the ANC has opened a case accusing the said MP of sedition, hate speech and treason and the matter is under investigation.

However, we need to remind ourselves that this is a constitutional democracy where matters which the opposition political parties have even approached the constitutional court to preside over their grievances. South Africa has witnessed far too much violence and segregation and many people died because of the resort to violence as a means to advance political agendas.

The ANC in 1961 did not take the decision of resorting to arming the people and overthrowing the apartheid government by military means lightly, and understood the consequences of such a decision. This was not a decision taken in front of cameras and lights of news agencies whose main objective was to attain inflammatory headlines.

It was not against a government that was legitimately elected by the majority of South Africans but against a government that practiced a system declared a crime against humanity. Chris Hani, one of the first commanders who led the ANC’s Wankie and Sipololo Campaign that sought to penetrate South Africa through the then Rhodesia explained the horror of losing his cadres in battle when they faced with the reality of what war meant.

A decision to declare war against an elected government cannot be taken lightly, without due consideration of where we come from and a proper calculation of the casualties that may be suffered as a results of such war mongering.

As a country, especially as young people, we must declare that our parents lost their lives, were imprisoned and exiled for many years so that we enjoy the freedom of resolving conflicts through constitutional means. But this is the same political party that declares allegiance to the constitution, whilst in turn, when they hope that we are not looking, decides to resort to war-talk and declare to unseat this government through violence. They failed at the elections in 2014. They failed with impeachment. Now they want to take up arms. We will not retreat. We will not surrender. The ANC will be ready to defend the democratic gains.

In Chapter 11, Section 198 (a) of the constitution declares that “national security must be the resolve of South Africans, as individuals and as a nation, to live as equals, to live in peace and harmony, to be free from fear and to seek a better life” and subsection (b) states the “resolve to live in peace and harmony and precludes any South African citizen from participating in armed conflict, nationally or internationally, except as provided for in the constitution or national legislation”.

Subsection (d) declares that national security is subject to the authority of parliament and the national executive”

The constitution recognizes a ‘single defence force as the lawful military force in the republic’, and that ‘no member of the security service may obey a manifestly illegal order, prejudice or further in a non-partisan political party interest. Section 202 (1) declares that the President as head of the national executive is the Commander in Chief of the defence force, and must appoint the military command of the defence force.

There is no mention of red berets, aspirant peacetime heroes, comic book inspired paper tigers, pretenders to the thrones, hoodlums masked as representatives of the people, common war mongers who have never faced live ammunition in war lest they wet their red pants—but ONLY the President.

If you really want to be the Commander in Chief, go to elections in 2019 and win.

Now, as I said earlier, I come bearing gifts, and I gave one for you Honourable MP. If you can learn how to operate this, assemble it, and be able to aim and shoot anyone until they wet their pants, I will be convinced that you are capable of removing the unelected ward committee of the ANC in Seshego Zone 1 with the barrel of the gun.

This democracy did not come easy, this freedom was as a result of the blood of Kalushi Mahlangu, Chris Hani and many others. We will not be hoodwinked by your microphone fuelled adrenaline to forsake it merely so that you can achieve your short term animosity towards the ANC and its President. I found it interesting that you sent your 15 fighters here to come and fight, whilst you were hiding somewhere. What kind of a CIC are you that leads from behind?

The youth of this country have challenges, are looking for jobs, need to start small business, demands education and quality health care. They do not want irresponsible leadership that seeks to only drive them to war as sacrificial lambs. They know that the price is just too much to pay.

Fellow South Africans, again, the opposition finds itself having run out of ideas and short of alternatives, and maybe our call for change, for a new opposition, is more relevant than ever before.

And finally let me conclude by saying:

Congratulations to the EFF for filling up Orlando Stadium.

You really reminded me of my preschool classmate, Frankenstein, who was four years older than all of us, finally passed with distinction his midyear tests. Boy did he party, posted the preschool report on his forehead for all to know, get pats on the shoulder, given half a bag of candy and really believed that he will go through to Grade 1 at the end of the year. I wonder what happened to Baby Frank, as we marched through to school the next year.

Issued by the ANC caucus, 5 April 2016