Address by Cope Parliamentary Leader, Dr Mvume Dandala on the occasion of the Budget Vote of the Presidency in the National Assembly, June 23 3009

Honourable Speaker

Mr President

Honourable Members

It is heartening Mr President, that your government has rapidly started working with many of your ministers getting their heads around their various portfolios. We commend your government for this. While the most pressing issues facing our people are unemployment and poverty in the face of a recession, we believe that amongst the most crucial tasks facing your particular office are nation building, turning the many promises your party has made into practical reality for our people, as well as the building of a value system that will guide our national life to realize the South African dream. 

Leadership

Regarding nation building, it is necessary for you to assure the nation that:

·         The apparent blurring of lines between the state and party, as we saw on June 16 - will stop. South African people want to acknowledge the important historical days of their nationhood without feeling bulldozed into partisan events. It is critical that the president is seen to be our president, not the president of ANC members only; but also the rest of us, including those who voted for other parties. Our constitution is very clear about the duties and responsibilities of the national executive we need assurance that we will not have a situation of the blurring of the lines between what the party must do to ensure that its electoral mandate is met and what the President and its cabinet must do in a non partisan manner to build a united country and nation. The Congress of the People will support you sir, in seeking to achieve this.

·         The hard won civil liberties and the country's well developed human rights culture will not be eroded in the name of national security. We need the President's assurance that state resources are not used for party political purposes such as the surveillance of opposition parties and private individuals. We will be taking up the harassment of our members by state organs through the police and hope that these will be investigated and brought to a stop.

·         The nation needs to be assured that institutions such as the judiciary as well as the media (especially the SABC), are safe under your watch and will stay independent.

Monitoring and Implementation

The increased size of government is a source of great concern especially given the recession. We would need an indication of how much more state resources will be deployed to make the new ministries and departments that you have established function. In the face of calls by government to citizens to tighten their belts to deal with the recession, we believe that government should be leading by example. On more programmatic matters your presidency is substantially different and the current budget will need a major re-examination given the existence of National Planning Commission and the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Unit which will also be responsible for the administration of the Presidency. COPE therefore supports the budget vote with a firm understanding that this will be adjusted to meet the changed envisaged by the new structure of the current presidency.

As our constitution reflects, South Africa is an incredibly diverse society. How will integrated planning work with this? Is it designed to advance it, or to frustrate it? Which parts of our national life will be subject to a single plan? Integrated planning has the potential to facilitate and encourage the resourcefulness of a country's citizens, or it can respond to its own logic, centralize itself to command and regiment without regard to any active, unfolding realities. South Africans deserve to know that the government's new planning approach will not amount to that.

COPE will thus be observing that central planning does not stifle innovation and slow down service delivery. As it is the wheels of government are already known for turning notoriously slowly. What the country needs is something that will change this reality. The worst that can happen is for reporting ministries to be driven less by the actual reality of the needs of citizens than by the monitoring measures to be met.

And how will central planning affect the economy? Is the economy to be centrally planned, with different players exerting undue pressure on setting prices, interest rates and exchange rates? In this regard unless the relationship between the planning commission, the ministries of finance, economic development and trade and industry is carefully co-ordinated, it will generate dangerous duplication and engender considerable  confusion in the minds of investors. 

COPE envisages a distributed planning instrument in which facilitation and coordination channel energies towards desired ends, and in which initiative is vested in individual ministries with internalized monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Such an arrangement would be more sensitive to the needs of different regions, provincially and locally. The planning ministry would then concern itself with high level coordination and reporting. This is what is desired in the spirit of our constitution.

Values

Finally Mr President, we have noted the President's stated commitment to fighting corruption in the public service and we wish to encourage you. We would like to believe that the action of the Premier of Gauteng who has let an MEC resign out of the misuse of public resources is the first sign of the fulfilment of this commitment by the Presidency.

This is necessary for the introduction of a new culture of accountability in our politics. On the other hand the ongoing saga of the Arms deal continues to eat at the heart of our body politic. Hasn't the time come for the President to bite the bullet and appoint an independent judicial commission of inquiry to deal with this matter decisively and transparently? It does not help the morale of the nation to keep hearing allegations of new evidence and denials if this whole process is not reopened and dealt with openly. This we believe will put the whole saga to bed once and for all.

COPE will continue to call for a value centred society across all facets of our national life - where values of honesty, accountability and compassion will characterize our national agenda. In this regard we hope that you will reactivate the moral regeneration campaign that you once led a few years ago.

Thank you Mister Speaker.

Source: Congress of the People

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