Speech by Marius Fransman, ANC leader of the opposition in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament, in the debate on Premier Helen Zille's State of the Province Address, June 24 2014
Madame Speaker
It is good to be back!
1) Introduction & Historical Context
We have just celebrated two decades of democracy. A democracy built on the vision of the founding parents of the African National Congress and a hundred and two years of struggle for social, political and economic emancipation.
A democracy crafted from the aspirations of the masses of our people as expressed in the Freedom Charter of 1955. A democracy grounded in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and our Bill of Rights which enshrines the vision of a national democratic society that is non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, just and equal, and in which all can enjoy prosperity.
As we begin the 5th democratic administration term we do so knowing full well that as a country and a province we have indeed travelled a long and hard road over the past 20 years and as country we have made many advances in building a better life for all our people.
2) The State of the State in the Western Cape
Five years of DA rule in the Western Cape from 2009 to 2014 under the guise of an Open, Equal Opportunity Society, has seen the pursuit of what Lenin in his ‘The State and Revolution" calls, and I quote, "Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich -" close quote
This myopia and willful compromise of the interests of the poor masses is evident everywhere. In the composition of the cabinet, representation in management echelons, slow pace of the transformation agenda, protection of White privilege and class economic interests and skewed service delivery patterns.
It is the height of being disingenuous therefore to claim the vision of an Open, Equal Opportunity society in the name of Nelson Mandela when five years of DA government has vitiated against every principle he stood for. Instead of reaching out to accept his hand of national reconciliation, nation building and strengthening social cohesion we have seen the DA protect the laager of mainly White privilege and class interests.
Over the past five years we have witnessed the most intense war on the poor in every area from housing to sanitation, from public transport to the plight of backyard dwellers. From basic education to the suffering of farm-workers; from the cultural and indigenous rights of the Khoi-San to violence perpetrated against communities in drug-infested and crime-ridden areas.
3) What Must Be Done
Madam Speaker
The question that must be addressed is: what must be done? What must be done to address the challenges of our historical legacy which is still the lived experience of millions of ordinary women and men in the Western Cape, both urban and rural? What must be done to take South Africa and the Western Cape forward? What must be done to make this province truly a place of equality, dignity and prosperity for all?
The Western Cape is a story of two provinces: one for the rich and mainly White, the other for the poor and mainly Coloured and African. In 2011, when the national census was done: 32% of our children lived below the poverty line; the majority, if not exclusively, being Coloured and African children. This is but one example of a statistic that hides the deep wound of poverty.
On the other hand, between 2009 and 2012, the years for which complete GDP figures are available and in which this provincial government was in power, the Western Cape was ranked third behind Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal in terms of GDP.
If we were to look at the serious challenge of jobs: for the same period, only 191 000 jobs were created in the DA run Western Cape; of which half went to Whites. This is a direct result of the "open opportunity society" - social Darwinism, as it were, the survival of the richest.
We can therefore never give full expression to the vision of reconciliation, nation-building and social cohesion unless we address the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment based on our historical legacy of centuries of colonialism, imperialism and decades of apartheid.
The Western Cape will never be able to realise the vision and objective of a truly non-racial and non-sexist national democratic society unless we are able to effectively engage transforming 8 areas which include:
1) Building an inclusive economy that is able to create jobs.
Our economy needs to become more inclusive through very deliberate and practical interventions by the state. We must facilitate the direct participation of the majority of our people in the economic mainstream of this province and not treat them merely as commodities coming from the labour reserves of Atlantis, Mitchells Plain or Khayelitsha.
We must ensure that small business, the informal traders, and entrepreneurs especially the historically disadvantaged, are able to gain entry into the market. This will include, ensuring that our policy and legislative frameworks are biased in favour of the small businessmen and not big business.
We welcome the fact that the policy and programs initiated by the ANC government from 2004 to 2009 is still in progress, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Call Centre sector, the Oil and Gas Sector, Tourism and the IDZ and Special Economic Zones. These interventions without exception emanate from the policy provisions and resolutions of the ANC Conferences at Polokwane and Mangaung and as implemented in the programs of National Government.
The key questions remain how these interventions are leveraged to meet the strategic objectives of redress and broadening participation in the mainstream economy as articulated by President Nelson Mandela as early as 2 February 1999 at the opening of the West Coast Spatial Development Initiative.
The call for an inclusive economy in the Western Cape is meaningless without radical economic transformation including addressing the patterns of ownership, relooking at public property lease agreements and how these perpetuate practices of the past. This provincial government needs to be deliberate in how property acquisitions and disposals are structured; examine land usage agreements and how these have been abused at the expense of the state and without furthering the interests of the poorest of the poor. We also make a special call on the Western Cape provincial government to put aside your bias and initiate a partnership with the NYDA to ensure our youth are not denied opportunities.
2) Transform our rural areas through focused infrastructure based and rural and agrarian land reform
No matter how much lip service we pay to being open and equal society, the reality is that we are haunted by our colonial and apartheid past, particular in a rural context. The recent memories of our farm worker strikes indicate how manifest the inequality is. These should be sufficient wake-up call for this province to seriously begin to address the centuries of neglect and loss as a result of our colonial and apartheid legacy.
We can never successfully transform our rural areas unless there is a sensitive balance between economic interests and social imperatives. We cannot succeed in addressing the historic legacies in the Western Cape whilst there are still evictions, assaults, slave wages and a tot-system in disguise being perpetuated.
3) Ensuring decent living conditions and sustainable and integrated human settlements.
The evidence of the long-term consequences of apartheid spatial planning is evident all over this province. Unless there is a commitment to breaking down this legacy that divides and separates the people of this province, we are literally farting against the wind.
In the face of growing urban migration and the arrival of more so-called "refugees" into this province, and the continued lack of planning, slow pace of implementation and failure to meet delivery targets we are being driven to the brink of a precipice the consequences of which are too horrendous to contemplate. This is compounded by an ever growing waiting-list, a back-yard dweller problem that is already bursting at the seams and a Rip Van Winkel housing strategy to address the myriad of complex challenges in this area.
Year in and year out, the worse 48 informal settlements are severely affected by floods in winter and fires in summer. Yet besides the fact that there is no attempt to find a sustainable remedy to the situation in these informal settlements, during, this the heart of winter, the Premier makes no mention of our people in these areas in her SOPA.
As a Premier of the whole province you must be accountable and responsible for failing to deliver on the very targets you have set and the resources you received for the previous 5 years.
4) Improving and expanding education and training
Education is the most fundamental building block in transforming the future of this province. If the edifice of education in this province is premised on unequal access, be that through financial means, historical challenges, social constraints or any other impediment, we can never fully eradicate the legacy that prepared the majority of the people of this province to be cheap labour; languishing on farms, factories and shop-floors.
We appeal to this provincial government to improve our schools not close them down.
5) Ensure quality healthcare for all through the implementation of a national health insurance.
In so doing we will be bringing down the costs of healthcare for the poor. Our health care system must be one that is premised upon the principles of preventative healthcare for the poor.
We welcome your administration and party's support and endorsement of the NDP. However our support cannot be a cherry-picking one. You must embrace the entire Plan including NHI and we are looking forward to you commencing the roll-out of this policy.
6) Expanding our current comprehensive social security policy in order that more poverty stricken families gain access to social security benefits in order to buffer our poor and poverty stricken from deeper poverty
7) Fight corruption and Crime
The approach to fighting crime and corruption is a holistic one that requires synergy, synchrony and functional coherence between government departments, social and security clusters, and spheres of government, together in partnership with communities.
Our approach to resolve crime and building safer communities is to focus not only on the effects but causes as well. Crime statistics indicate that both perpetrators and victims of serious and violent crime remain our African and Coloured working class and poor townships across the Western Cape. It is these communities that are most vulnerable to murder, rape, robbery, domestic violence and drug dealing and abuse, and gangsterism amongst others.
Most of these crimes are historically linked to either alcohol or drug abuse. Our own historical legacy of apartheid as exposed by the TRC shows how the previous regime worked with gang leaders to flood our communities with drugs and increase the culture of gangsterism.
Madam Premier it is not enough to say that the only function of the Department of Community Safety and CPFS role is purely oversight. The Department of Community Safety needs to provide the necesary support and resources to communities and CPFs, neighborhood watches and street committees to help in the fight against crime.
8) A united nation and promoting social cohesion
Given our historical context of the apartheid legacy, its psychological scars and spatial planning, our communities remain divided and mistrustful of each other. It is the role of government to create an enabling environment where we can begin to address the fears of White, the insecurities of Coloureds and perceptions of African alienation in this province.
We need to find ways where our different African, Coloured, Indian and White communities can converge and get to know each other. This needs to happen through our schooling system, integrated and sustainable human settlements, sports festivals, music and arts festivals and heritage celebrations that are inviting and comfortable to all our diverse communities and cultures.
As a government you need to drive this process and show that we are caring and responsive to our diversity. We cannot assume, as the open opportunity society does, that the social cohesion and building of social capital between our different communities are an organic process that will occur inherently.
We cannot have a leadership that through there words an actions alienate large sections of our communities by referring to them as "refugees", or not allowing the Cape Malay Choirs and Klopse to March and our Khoi San community to display there heritage.
9) DA Delivery and the Open Opportunity Society
Madam Speaker and Madam Premier
Allow me to address the claim that an opportunity society is premised on the cornerstone of our constitution and its founding principles. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Let me remind this House and our people of the Western Cape what the Constitution of the Republic in its Preamble says, and I quote:
We the people of South Africa,
Recognize the injustices of our past...
We therefore through our freely elected representatives adopt this Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Republic so as to ...
Lay the foundations for democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected before the law;
Madam Speaker
If the record of the DA's delivery of an open opportunity society over the past 5 years is anything to go by as well as the Premier's SOPA then in fact it could be argued that the Premier is in reality in violation of the Constitution.
She has a moral responsibility to put in place clear policies and programs to address the historical legacies of Apartheid in this province.
She has failed!
Instead the body of evidence of the open opportunity society reveals a resistance to the Preamble of our Constitution which requires this government to "Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;"
We want to remind the Premier that the very essence of our Constitution is that it is a transformative one which requires that there is duty upon government to proactively redress the historical legacies of apartheid scars at all levels.
Madam Speaker, in a province where the issue of employment equity performance is the worst in the country and where Whites still constitute more than 76% of senior management (private and public sector combined) it is rather telling.
We call on Madam Premier to clarify how her government intends to address this area of transformation and redress in the workplace.
We also call on the Premier to provide clarity in respect broad based black economic empowerment policies.
Madam Speaker
We call on this government to support the NDP fully including the objectives related to building social cohesion and patriotism. We likewise applaud the way in which President Jacob Zuma has set up the NDP as a genuine attempt to get South Africa's development trajectory on the high road of development, and to transcend the departmental and party political in the interest of real integration, cooperation and focused prioritisation of plans, programmes and resource allocation.
You may recall Madam Speaker how the Honourable Premier tweeted on June13 last year that 'no one has to use a bucket in this province.' Only to be contradicted by the Mayor when she clarified that there were about 600 households that lacked access to decent sanitation. That very figure was contradicted by the City's own human settlements report that confirmed that no less than 80 000 households had no access to proper sanitation. This cause was not being assisted by the DA's denialism.
Subsequent to that damning evidence the Human Rights Report-finding on sanitation was even more telling as it blatantly stated and I quote: 'the situation as you can see for yourself is devastating both in terms of the indignity and serious health implications in the unservicing of the toilets and the fact that people have to empty these buckets themselves.' (Close quote) This finding was later corroborated by New Age headline which read that 'the Western Cape let the poor down'.
The Premier has not explained what this province will do to address all the current challenges of governance and service delivery that our province is currently facing at a local government level. Local Government is the coal face of our service delivery and political instability breeds governance instability. We call on the Premier to ensure that there is effective local government-performance auditing on treatment of poorest of the poor and vulnerable.
10) Conclusion
Madam Speaker
We have come a long way over the past twenty years. The key challenge we face in the Western Cape over the next five years is how we address the de-racialisation of our province's economy. We continue to make many gains but our society is far from de-racialised and the imperatives of restorative justice remain as relevant today as it was at the dawn of our democracy. This task, to paraphrase the words of Martin Luther King from his speech ‘I have a dream', shall remain a priority for as long as we remain ‘an island of prosperity in the midst of a vast ocean of poverty'.
I thank you!
Issued by the ANC Western Cape, June 24 2014
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