Note to editors: The following speech will be delivered in Parliament today by Democratic Alliance Parliamentary Leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko MP, in response to the State of the Nation Address.

Mr Speaker,
Honourable President,
Distinguished Guests,
Honourable Members,

In our country today, we often talk about two South Africas: the rich and the poor; the white and the black; the rural and urban, and many more besides. These stories reflect divisions in our past that, until now, we have been unable to properly bridge.

But, today, while we are reflecting on the State of the Nation, I believe we should be talking about how the South Africa we live in differs from the South Africa we dream about.

In the South Africa we live in, we face hard realities. Millions of our people lack the means to live lives of their own choosing; communities are brutalised by violent crime, the burden of disease robs our citizens of opportunities, and young people without education or employment wake up day after day to a gaping void of hopelessness. In the South Africa that we live in, our problems are all too real and grow bigger every day, their solutions moving further from our grasp.

But we do not have to accept this. I don't want to live in a South Africa in which you are locked into a particular kind of life forever, simply because you were born into it. And I believe there can be an alternative; another country of our making.

My fellow South Africans, our best years are ahead of us, and the party I lead in Parliament offers a vision to get us there.

People are wounded in post-Apartheid South Africa. And it is difficult to focus on the future when the pain of the past can still be felt today.

But as much as the past has shaped us, we cannot keep living in it. We need avenues to the future.

So our vision is to heal us.

Our history doesn't just remain in the past; it speaks to us and informs our decisions. And so we must be guided by our history but not imprisoned by it.

So our vision is to free us.

Our inability to achieve real reconciliation through economic redress is at the heart of our national discontent.

So our vision is to build that opportunity.

To bring people together, we need to build a bridge across the divide between privilege and poverty that divides our people along racial lines. We have to help people where they need it and provide real opportunity that will break down these inequalities. When we do that, we will achieve a real and lasting reconciliation.

But our vision will mean little if a DA government does not offer the means to reach the future.

Mr Speaker, I stand here today as the proud new leader of an opposition which is also a government-in-waiting. Over the coming months and years, we will exercise oversight, draft legislation and hold the governing party accountable for its outcomes. We will speak for the millions of South Africans whose voices have gone unheard in this Parliament, and we will sketch for every one of them a picture of a growing and prosperous South Africa under a Democratic Alliance national government.

We know that we face tremendous challenges of crime, violence and abuse. I believe that, in many ways, these social disruptions have at their heart a lack of real opportunity in society.

But we know that there are other causes to these problems too. We know that the menace of crime, which keeps our people hostage to fear, is aided by the weaknesses in the very systems that are meant to protect us.

We cannot hope to keep our streets safe when the shadow of corruption stalks the highest levels of our police service. We cannot take the fight to the criminals that plague us when we lack experienced management at all levels of our police service. And we cannot hope to have an effective service that complements an open and free democracy when our police are militarised, in name and in their actions.

South Africans will not feel safe until they hear an honest discussion about crime at the highest levels of government.

Nor will they have confidence in our health system, let alone in a National Health Insurance scheme, until we face the fundamental problems that threaten it.

Because the problem in health is not the principle of access. The problem in health in South Africa is that our existing network of care is not adequately managed.

What we need are competent and professional hospital managers who are not accountable to a bureaucracy but to the hospitals themselves. Real accountability and professionalism will go a long way toward addressing the deficiencies in healthcare.

If these capacity problems are not addressed, our health system will deteriorate even further, with or without an NHI and it will be the poorest South Africans who suffer.

So our vision is to address their plight.

To implement a real programme of redress that will build reconciliation and change our society, we must also have the tools of change at our disposal.

To do that, a DA government will focus on the two things that can truly create opportunity: education and the economy.

The two are intertwined with each other, as they are with our failure or success as a country.

Since the beginning of our democracy, much has been achieved in education. We have historic levels of access, a standardised curriculum for all our learners regardless of race, and exceptional levels of budgetary investment year on year.

But as much as we have invested, education is seldom the vehicle for opportunity that so many of our children need it to be. Too many of them become lost in a system that seems to have a measure of failure hard-wired into it.

South Africans don't have to live in that country if they choose not to.

I don't believe that we should just celebrate access. We should celebrate children completing their education. Over a million learners enrolled for grade one in 2000. But only half that number wrote matric last year, and just over 348 000 passed.

That means just 33% of the children who started school in grade one finished matric.

Why is this?

In disadvantaged schools, teachers work on average three and a half hours a day compared to six and a half in advantaged schools. In disadvantaged schools, a fifth of teachers are absent on Fridays and almost 30% of students are taught maths by teachers with no maths qualification.

If we compromise on our children's education, we accept a two-tiered school system as an unchangeable fact of life.

Education is the only way out for most people who want to work to have a better life than the one they were born into.

I do not believe that we should accept that there will always be schools that are terminally dysfunctional or that there will always be some teachers who will not or cannot teach. There should be no such thing as compromising on a child's future.

So our vision is not to compromise.

Because education is the foundation of an economic strategy that seeks to build opportunity, I believe that we should give schools that are performing more power to manage their own affairs.

We will direct maximum resources to the first three years of schooling and ensure that there is compulsory testing of all learners from grades one through six.

We will maximise resource spending on schools that have gone without for decades, supplying them with text-rich content and books, delivered on time, before using money on bloated administrative functions.

And we won't just make schools a place where our children are evaluated. They need to be taught by people who demonstrate not only their capacity but also their passion for education. We will give those with this calling that chance.

Most teachers deserve our thanks for their dedication and the work they do. But just as teachers have rights, so do children.

Our government will pass legislation that would respect teachers' right to strike but subject to certain limitations. Before a strike can happen, there will need to be consultation and agreement between the government, the unions and school governing bodies.

In education, we need partners who are truly willing to help our children, every step of the way. So we won't forget about the majority of teachers who want to be part of our pact for the future.

But in the dream of our future, fixing the schools is just one part.

If we can ensure that our children get the best education they possibly can, then we must ensure that they can enter an economy where they can find a job.

In several ways, South Africa's economy has flourished in the democratic era, free of the shackles of sanctions, restricted trade access and warped internal economic policies.

But the country we live in today has some very harsh economic realities. We applaud any gains in the fight against unemployment and real indicators that show victory in this struggle.

However, an expanded definition of unemployment - which includes those who have given up looking for work - shows that more than 100 000 jobs were lost last year. Furthermore, the last decade has produced only 624 000 jobs, meaning that total employment has only increased at a rate of 0.5%.

This means that the rate of job creation would need to rise by nearly 10 times in order to meet the most optimistic projections of job creation for the end of the decade.

In contrast, one of our fellow BRICS countries, Brazil, has an unemployment rate five times lower than ours.

And we continue to experience lukewarm economic growth. Last year we grew at 3.4% while Africa, the continent we claim to lead, experienced a growth rate of 5.5%. And countries in our region like Angola and Botswana are growing at 9.4% and 7.8%.

I believe that South Africa's major challenge lies in its competitiveness. We are less efficient than many of our emerging market competitors. Turkey, for instance, withdraws more value out of every rand from taxation than we do. Other governments simply develop higher returns.

South African labour is uncompetitive. Labour productivity is much lower than the rest of the developing world. Our competitiveness has slipped in key sectors such as mining, agriculture and manufacturing.

In mining especially, South Africa is not as profitable or as desirable as elsewhere in Africa. So, in the midst of a commodity price boom, we saw investment in the mining sector drop off.

Expensive and highly regulated labour kills competitiveness and it kills jobs. And increased state intervention in the economy bloats the public sector and creates inefficiencies.

A commitment to intervention for intervention's sake means that we have too many voices saying too many different things. If investors wanted to predict what South Africa's economic policy was going to look like in three years' time they would have to consult: The New Growth Path, the National Development Plan, the Industrial Policy Action Plan and the budgeting process, and try to understand the many contradictions between them.

I propose that we take our economy from being an average performer with massive potential, to one that capitalises on our advantages to grow faster and assume the economic leadership role in Africa we should have.

As part of our vision for South Africa, we will ease labour market entry to include voluntary exemptions for designated economic areas. This will create a competitive niche entry point for first-time workers.

Complementing that strategy, we would introduce a targeted youth wage subsidy for jobseekers between 18 and 29 years old earning below the personal income tax threshold; a policy that the Finance Minister would like to implement, but likely cannot.

Opportunity will be extended to those wishing to start their own businesses. We will create a one-stop-shop for business registrations where prospective entrepreneurs may register a company name, lodge their documentation with the Companies Commission and register with SARS and the Department of Labour.

Opportunity must take stock of those who have been systemically and historically disadvantaged. One of the ways to do this is to ensure that there is true financial redress for those who were blocked from accessing economic opportunities in the past.

That means making economic empowerment truly broad-based. I think that our current model, reliant on arbitrary quotas, has done little more than expand the size of the financial elite by creating a special category of beneficiaries who are empowered again and again.

Our vision is to do more to help the average worker become an owner of capital. That means building into contracts the need for real partnerships between business and employees and incentivising share ownership across the economy.

And we will invest in infrastructure. This investment, when coupled with a sound financial strategy and real capacity in implementing agents, is the best way the state can create the economic enabling environment for growth.

But I think that we should also realise that the state cannot be the final determinant in the economy and that as much as we invest in infrastructure, the state cannot have a holistic plan for every sector, especially when marred by incapacity.

As such, a DA government would replace the current Industrial Policy Action Plan 2 with a streamlined Industrial Development and Growth Strategy (IDGS) that would focus on specific activities rather than whole sectors, create targeted financial incentives for new enterprises and develop a dedicated state Venture Capital Fund.

And we will address one of the most divisive legacies of our past, the legacy of the 1913 Land Act. We know that people who once made their living off the land were driven from it and forced into an economy for which the compounding sin of Bantu Education deliberately provided limited skills. But land reform in our country is not working because of the incompetence and incapacity of the very institutions that are supposed to drive it.

So our vision is to make right that wrong.

We will use the mechanisms at our disposal to create truly diverse rural ownership. And that diversity is not about empowering a segment of society that is already empowered. It is about giving new opportunities to those who are without resources and who want to farm.

But, Mr Speaker, this vision will fade if we serve ourselves and not the country.

We will restore dignity to public service; a dignity in which politics is governed by the aspiration to serve, not the desire to accumulate.

As the custodians of the state, we will ensure that we limit opportunities for corruption. I think that as public servants, we should be an embodiment of what's best about those who wish to work towards the future, faithfully and honestly. That doesn't mean having the courage of our convictions only for the cameras. It means working each day with integrity.

Key to our vision will be bigger penalties, and better enforcement of punitive clauses in the Public Finance Management Act. We will introduce a National Business Interests of Employees Act to ensure that partnership between the state and business is not channeled through the businesses of those who work for the state.

Mr Speaker, the South Africa that we want is not born of false promises.

Our vision will end the expectation that some generations will be lost. We will only be satisfied when we know that our children will have more than we do.

The government must empower, not prohibit. It must provide opportunity, not encumber.

We do not have to resign ourselves to this country that we live in today. When we start accepting that we have the means to realise our deepest hopes and ambition, we can make the country of our dreams a reality.

That is the vision we offer South Africa today. We demand the future we dreamed of in 1994. And in our future, we will make it together.

I thank you.

Issued by the DA, February 14 2012

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