State of the Nation Address Debate 2013 by Public Works Deputy Minister Jeremy Cronin

20 Feb 2013

Mr President, your State of the Nation Address (SoNA) and the subsequent two days of debate have been marked essentially by two contrasting standpoints - on the one hand, a President, an African National Congress (ANC) and an ANC-led government sharing with the country a perspective on important progress that is under-way across a wide scope of sectors and regions.

This is concrete progress, notwithstanding many remaining challenges, that is being achieved not by government or the ANC alone. It is progress that we are making together as South Africans, through consultation, through popular mobilisation, often through tough engagements in the midst, sometimes, of crises, in which competing sectoral interests are aired and a common line of action is thrashed out.

That is one side of the story of this SoNA debate - an ANC and an ANC-led government taking responsibility for listening to, engaging with and mobilising the energies and aspirations of the widest array of South Africans, across the public and private sectors.

On the other side, in this debate - with a few welcome exceptions (like the speakers for the APC, AZAPO and the UDM) - we have observers, we have an opposition bloc focused on division, negativity, and carping. Mr President you, and subsequent ANC speakers in this debate, have laid great stress upon the National Development Plan. You correctly noted that it has been endorsed by a wide spectrum of South Africans as a 20 year vision and as a broad road-map to address the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and crisis levels of unemployment.

This is our approach to the National Development Plan (NDP). The opposition parties have also endorsed (or should I say paid lip-service to?) the Plan. But what informs their approach to the NDP is a very ignoble objective. It is not to build collective South African unity in action - but rather to be divisive, to be oppositional for the sake of opposition, to drive wedges.

They seek to twist and distort NDP to pit the government against the labour movement, the ANC against teachers. They vainly want to play the National Development Plan off against the New Growth Path. They seek to launch the unemployed against the working poor.

Opportunism, short-termism, narrow-mindedness is the name of their game.

The Honourable Mazibuko (writing in the Sunday Independent, Feb 17) tells us that President Zuma "pays nominal lip service ... to the National Development Plan. But his heart is with the outdated heavy hand of the government of the New Growth Path...he remains wedded to the discredited concept of government interventionism in the economy."

Bizarrely, in the very next sentence, the Hon Mazibuko is advising President Zuma to "look at the success of our fellow BRICS partners..." Does she honestly believe that the economic practices in India, or Brazil, or Russia, or China are less state interventionist than our own?

The DA portrays the National Development Plan as if it were essentially a laissez-faire manifesto. Leave business to business, they tell us. Government, they tell us, hiding behind their misrepresentation of the NDP for their authority, shouldn't "second-guess" the so-called market.

That arch-Thatcherite, Mr Lorimer, DA, told us yesterday that "if there was money to be made in beneficiation, then business would have done it long ago." There you have it - beneath all the professed concern for the poor and the unemployed, the real yardstick of viability for anything is whether short-term, mega-profits can be sucked out of SA, whether the voracious appetites of a cosmopolitan few can be fed.

If not, Lorimer is telling us, it can't be done. That is not the yardstick we use for assessing the economic viability or social desirability of doing something, including beneficiation. You might as well as say that we shouldn't deal with acid mine drainage in Gauteng, "After all, if there was money to be made in cleaning up the acid mine drainage, business would have done it long ago." For us the key priorities are long-term economic, social and environmental sustainability and job creation - and it is a perspective we believe that is shared by most South Africans, including serious business-people, and serious investors.

While decrying the alleged "interventionist" nature of the New Growth Path, or of our beneficiation policies, the DA quickly abandons its own free market fundamentalism when it comes to dealing with the working class and the labour market. Here, of course, they want autocratic state intervention into the market.

The Hon Mazibuko reacted to Thursday's State of the Nation Address by saying that the President had "failed" to intervene decisively by not unilaterally, top-down proclaiming the implementation of a "youth wage subsidy".

The attempts to goad government into anti-worker, union-bashing have also been in evidence on the education front. The DA knows full well that it is not just Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and its affiliate SADTU that have opposed an outright ban on strikes in the education sector - all other union federations and teacher professional bodies have opposed such a move. We are into the Oscar Film awards season, and here the Rev Kenneth Meshoe must surely receive a belated nomination for best male Comedy performance. He told us on the post-SONA "After eight debate" on SABC that "teachers should only be allowed to strike...after work" (!!)

Of course, seeking to build consensus does not mean that as the ANC-led government we should not take a firm line on key principles and provide leadership, not just to the union movement, but also to the business sector, to communities, to all South Africans. You did this, Mr President, for instance, by clearly signalling that in the legitimate exercise of the right to strike or protest, Government would not tolerate violence, the injuring or killing of others, or the wanton destruction of property, especially public property. You spent some time making this point.

However, in another Oscar-winning performance a certain leader of an opposition Party (name with-held) was so busy handing out Valentine's Day flower bouquets that he forgot to listen your SoNA speech. He told the public broadcaster that you had failed to condemn violence in strikes and public protests!!! What can one say? Perhaps the best we can suggest is (and with all due respect to all concerned, including the Catholic Church) - isn't it time that some on the opposition benches followed the example of Pope Benedict the 16th?

De Doorns

The Honourable Mazibuko, for a brief moment, spoke movingly about the plight of the unemployed poor. She asked us to put ourselves in the place of a mother without work or food for her family. She asked us to imagine being a young person with little hope of finding employment. It was moving and I wanted to believe in the sincerity of what she was saying. But then, as soon as the Honourable Trollip stood up - the spell was broken.

The concern of the DA for the unemployed poor is, at best, a 19th century philanthropic concern. The DA's real interest in the unemployed is as cannon-fodder to be deployed against the employed, against the working-poor, against the labour movement.

When the Honourable Trollip dealt with the recent strikes in the Boland, in De Doorns and elsewhere, he had a lot to say about unruly worker behaviour, he accused (in fine apartheid era style) COSATU personalities and others of being "agitators" and "opstokers" (although, truth be told, COSATU had very little to do with the original strike action). Not a word about the systemic violence experienced day-in-and-day-out by farmworkers. Not a word about the main disease profile that the local De Doorns Stofland clinic is dealing with - its not HIV/AIDS or TB (they are problems), it's malnutrition, particularly among the children of labour brokered workers from Lesotho and Zimbabwe working on these Boland farms - so much for their much vaunted ability to provide food security (for whom, one wonders).

For the DA if you are poor and passive you can be pitied. But the moment you are working for a boss, if you are employed, even at starvation wages, and especially if you rise up, no longer just as a victim but as a protagonist for change - then the paternalistic mask of empathy quickly slips. Suddenly, the Honourable Mazibuko's empathy for the poor and down-trodden flies out of the window.

The DA MEC for Agriculture in the Western Cape is completely conflicted in this matter - he's a farmer! Premier Zille was also conflicted, electorally conflicted. She didn't know whether to back her farm-owner supporters, or her potential coloured voters. She issued perhaps her most disgraceful statement ever. Flirting with a potentially xenophobic tinder-box, she attributed the strikes and unrest to rivalry between coloured farm-workers, African workers from the Eastern Cape, and labour-brokered Basotho and Zimbabwean workers. Although there had been inter-ethnic tensions of this kind in previous years, for instance in Grabouw. Last year and earlier this year, the farm protests were characterised by a remarkable class unity among coloured, African and non-national workers, united in a struggle against oppression and super-exploitation.

The Constitution

The opposition parties pay lip-service to the National Development Plan, while gutting it of its core values. They masquerade behind their misreading of the plan in order to disguise their fundamentally reactionary, anti-majority policies.

They play exactly the same game with the Constitution. The Honourable Mazibuko (in her Sunday Independent SoNA response) informs us, in regard to the challenges of land reform, that "the Constitution prescribes the ‘willing-buyer', ‘willing-seller' principle."

Which Constitution is that?? The actual Constitution prescribes something very different. The Bill of Rights Section 25 (5) prescribes that: "The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures...to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable [not narrowly, market-based] basis."

If you want to accuse us of not complying with the Constitution, then accuse us of not moving rapidly enough with land reform, accuse us of being too slow to move away from a purely market-based "willing-buyer, willing-seller" approach - but don't deliberately distort the Constitution for your own reactionary purposes.

Mr Speaker, it is unparliamentarily to accuse another member of lying to, or of deliberately misleading this House. So I will refrain from making any such accusation.

Yes, as we take forward the land reform process in this, the Centenary year of the barbaric 1913 Land Act, we will stick to the transformational spirit and the precise letter of the Constitution. The Constitution outlaws any arbitrary deprivation of property. The state may expropriate only in terms of a law of general application for a public purpose or in the public interest. The Constitution explicitly defines public interest to include "the nation's commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa's natural resources..."; and it adds, for good measure, "property is not limited to land."

Yes, compensation must be paid for any such expropriation. But again the Constitution is extremely clear - "the market value of the property" is only one of five criteria to be used in determining such compensation. Other criteria, include "the history of the acquisition and use of the property".

Terror Lekota

I would be doing a disservice to this debate if I were to neglect the valuable contribution of the Honourable Lekota. He gave us a lecture on dealing with "redundancies" in the public sector. He is, of course, an expert on dealing with redundancies. Offering yourself up for swallowing by the DA is, I suppose, one form of dealing with redundancy.

The Hon Lekota told us (or rather shouted at us) yesterday, saying: "They forget their people" ("they" being us in the ANC); "They forget their communities"; "They forget we shared mielies together in prison and spoke of a better life for all". Well, the Hon. Lekota also forgets. He forgets what he did when he was one of the longest serving Ministers of Defence in post-1994 SA.

He characterises the National Keypoints Act as "dastardly apartheid legislation" - and he is probably right. This Parliament does need to look at this anachronistic and problematic piece of legislation, it may well be unconstitutional.

But the Hon Lekota forgets that it has got his finger-prints all over it. On 26 March 2004 by proclamation as Minister of Defence he piloted a change to the Act. Did he use the opportunity to transform this piece of legislation dealing with security around sensitive localities to be in line with our new democracy? In line with our Constitution? No - he simply changed the definition of the responsible minister from Defence to Police, passing the buck.

The Honourable Lekota expresses outrage at the expense of security arrangements at President Zuma's private residence at Nkandla. But the Hon Lekota forgets that, if I am not mistaken, it was under his watch that the Department of Defence was involved in the security assessment at the Nkandla residence - which laid the basis for the probably excessive and undoubtedly extremely costly security operational requirements put in place.

I am not laying the entire blame on the Hon Lekota - I am just trying to help cure his amnesia. As the current Minister of Defence, the Hon Mapisa Nqakula made very clear yesterday - as the current government we are not running away from our responsibilities in this matter, and we will not sweep abuse under the carpet.

We take responsibility. This was a core theme of your SoNA speech Mr President. And again this contrasts sharply with the posture of the DA. In the course of her speech yesterday, the Hon. Mazibuko let slip an interesting state of mind. Gazing through a speculative long-range telescope into some distant future she announced that there "is hope". One day the DA would win a national majority. "There will be a day when the DA will serve the entire country." Doesn't this give the game away? They don't see themselves serving the entire country now.

Provincialism

They all too often reduce politics in SA to an inter-provincial Absa Currie Cup competition. As the ANC and ANC-led Government we are concerned about all the provinces of our country - regardless of which political party happens to be in the provincial majority. We celebrate successes in the Western Cape, and we share concerns about challenges in that province - as with any other province. Our commitment is to our country and its people, and not to a narrow party political electoralism.

But, of course, we are constantly treated to DA-boasting about how well the Western Cape is doing, as if it was all simply down to them. Historic advantages, the absence of a Bantustan legacy, and other deep structural realities are simply blotted out.

But okay, just for a moment, and at the risk of getting sucked into an Absa Currie Cup mode, let's look at comparative provincial statistics for what we all agree is the most important target of all in our country - job creation, and particularly youth job creation. If we look at the labour market statistics for the "New Growth Path" period - third quarter 2010 to third quarter 2012 - then we find an interesting pattern.

In terms of the change in employment numbers per province for this period, then it will come as no surprise that in terms of sheer numbers Gauteng does the best with 217,000 more in employment over this 2-year period. But, interestingly, Limpopo comes a close second with an increase of 184,000 in jobs, followed by KZN with 124,000. The Western Cape trails in at fourth position with an increase of 56,000 for the same period.

In terms of percentage increases, Limpopo is way ahead with a remarkable 20% increase in employment numbers, followed by Gauteng and KZN at 5%, with the Western Cape trailing in seventh place at 3%.

The figures for this two year period for youth employment are fairly similar. Most new jobs for youth were created in Limpopo, Gauteng and the Northern Cape.
Now, I am not quoting these statistics in order to fall into the same Absa Currie Cup game that the DA likes to play (when it suits them, of course). There are complex reasons for this pattern of job creation which cannot simply be reduced to an electoralist discourse. However, what surely cannot be doubted is that the remarkable performance of Limpopo has a great deal to do with the state-led, infrastructural programme under the auspices of the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission, specifically Strategic Integrated Project One ("unlocking the northern mineral belt").

In the course of this State of Nation debate the opposition parties have, once more, side-lined themselves from the broad, consensus-building processes underway in our country to address our many challenges - whether in the mining sector, or in regard to unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, land hunger and sustainable rural livelihoods, or transforming the lives of teachers or farm-workers. This is a self-inflicted marginalisation on their part.

I am sure, Mr President, in your response to the SoNA debate tomorrow you will, once more, generously invite the opposition parties to come down off their high perch of self-righteousness and join the rest of SA in the often complex and essential consensus-building process that is well under way - as we progressively roll-back poverty, unemployment and inequality. Whether they will hear you...well that's another matter entirely.

Issued by the Department of Public Works, February 21 2013

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