Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Leader AgangSA, Oliver Tambo Lecture, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, October 21 2013
Dear Friends,
President DeGioia, Dean Lancaster,
Honoured guests, faculty and students,
Thank you for the honour of inviting me to join the company of those who have delivered this lecture, named for one of South Africa's most distinguished sons. It is a particular privilege for me to come here to reflect on our progress and our challenges, since by giving Oliver Tambo a platform in 1987 when he was the leader in exile of the African National Congress (ANC), Georgetown played an important role in introducing him and his ideals to an American audience, this during an era in which conservative Western governments were still describing the leaders of our liberation movements as terrorists.
Your School of Foreign Service is renowned for its role in nurturing diplomats and public officials and in setting and guiding foreign policy agendas. I learn that you have just inaugurated a school of public policy: Congratulations, President DeGioia and the whole Georgetown community on that achievement; I am sure the McCourt School of Public Policy will play as important a role as the School of Foreign Service in improving standards of governance, not only in the United States but around the world.
Finally, on a personal note, I am proud that my son, Hlumelo Biko, had the privilege of a graduate school education at Georgetown.
Against the background of what's been happening in Washington recently, I find it somewhat ironic that I am here to discuss with you my deep concern about standards of government in our South African democracy, since it has seemed at times that an influential part of your body politic seems not to want to have government at all, or at least to have it in the most minimal sense.
To understand why Oliver Tambo's legacy is important to our country, let me tell you a little about him. He was a distinguished student of maths and science at the University of Fort Hare, the pioneer of university education for black South Africans. He went on to become an outstanding educator at the church-run St. Peter's School in Johannesburg, during which time he also became a founding member of the ANC Youth League. He left teaching to study law, and was later admitted as an attorney, practising in Johannesburg with Nelson Mandela, until he was forced to leave the country when the ANC was banned in 1960. In exile he became the leader of the ANC, playing -- as his biographer has said -- "the pivotal role in transforming the ANC from a small group of well-educated petitioners to a broad-based militant liberation movement..."
This short sketch helps to explain a number of characteristics about Oliver Tambo: his abiding interest in education, reflected in organising schooling for the education of refugees and activists who fled the country after the Soweto uprising; his thoughtfulness; his stature as an intellectual and his commitment to human rights, leading him to set up an independent inquiry into abuses in ANC camps and later to initiate a Bill of Rights. He was also an internationalist who built the ANC in exile by forming alliances and partnerships and persuading governments to boycott and isolate the apartheid regime.
In all his endeavours he was, as one of the founding members of our Constitutional Court, Justice Albie Sachs, has said, "a natural democrat". And his biographer has written that to his followers "he personified... the lure of altruistic ideas, spiritual affirmation and allegiance without material reward to which they had committed themselves when they first joined the movement." At Oliver Tambo's funeral in 1993, Nelson Mandela said of his old law partner: "Oliver lived because he had surrendered his very being to the people."
It is with sadness that I have to say today, nearly 20 years after our liberation, that although our achievements have been considerable, we are not living up to the ideals of Oliver Tambo. Many South Africans feel that the leaders of my generation have failed to deliver on the promise of freedom that so many of their forebears fought and died for.
Last week, the latest edition of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance -- the leading survey of the quality of governance in 52 countries across Africa -- was published. At one level, South Africa performs well on the Index. Compared to many African countries, we are still a land of immense potential, blessed with abundant natural, mineral and human resources. We have one of the world's most admired constitutions, which on paper protects fundamental human rights, enshrines respect for the rule of law and affirms the values of dignity, equality and freedom. Our democratic government in 1994 inherited a relatively developed economy, with some of the best-developed infrastructure on the continent.
But what is distressing is to see the areas in which the quality of governance in South Africa is slipping. In two of the four main categories used by the Ibrahim Index as benchmarks to measure the quality of our governance -- "participation and human rights" and "safety and the rule of law" -- our score has declined against the figures for 2000, the first year for which data was gathered. The Ibrahim Foundation judges the decline in participation and human rights to be "notable".
We have improved in the category "human development" but in 2012 we still fell behind countries such as Tunisia and Botswana. In education, we fall behind Ghana and in healthcare we were lower on the Index than Libya, Algeria and Egypt. We have improved in the category "sustainable economic opportunity" but our annual growth rates are well below the average for Africa, and the overall statistics conceal huge disparities between rich and poor -- matters to which I shall return. Researchers will no doubt be digging deeper into the data behind the Ibrahim Index, but in broad terms its indicators confirm what we see happening in our country.
Speaking in Cape Town earlier this month, the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- one of your past speakers in this series -- said that members of parliaments, as the politicians in closest contact with citizens, have an important role to play in holding leaders accountable. But in South Africa, that role is undermined by our electoral system of proportional representation.
You don't get to Parliament in South Africa because the people of your constituency vote you there: you are appointed from a list drawn up by your political party. The system was adopted in 1993 to ensure that minorities were not excluded from Parliament -- which might have happened in a constituency-based system -- but the effect at a national level has been that legislators are beholden to party bosses rather than voters.
Kofi Annan added in his Cape Town speech:
"After all, it is transparent and accountable institutions, not ‘strong men' or strong leaders that safeguard democracy and create the conditions for peace and prosperity."
But in South Africa, the institutions underpinning our democracy are either under-performing or under fire from within the governing party. Until quite recently, we had a great deal of confidence in our Independent Electoral Commission, but in the past year that has been eroded by maladministration at the highest levels of the commission and by the action of an official who disqualified candidates from a local election in order to protect the interests of the governing party. Our national ombudsman, the Public Protector, is doing extraordinarily valuable work in exposing corruption and poor administration, but members of the governing party in Parliament, who should be defending her, instead give every impression of trying to undermine her.
Our President has manipulated the justice system to avoid charges of corruption, and he is fighting every step of the way to avoid surrendering for public scrutiny the documents upon which prosecutors based their decision to withdraw charges against him. The appointment of a new National Director of Public Prosecutions has been mired in controversy, with the President's first choice dismissed by the courts as not being a fit person to hold the office.
Prosecutors acting under the leadership of a temporary director have dropped corruption charges against a number of prominent figures in other politically-sensitive cases. We are reaching the stage that if you are a high profile leader involved in corruption, a decision on whether you are prosecuted depends not on the evidence against you, but on how closely connected you are to the dominant faction of the governing party.
While our courts are still independent, government representatives in the commission which recommends the appointment of judges to the President show signs of preferring executive-minded candidates rather than the kind of human rights lawyers who were such a distinctive feature of the Bench when Nelson Mandela was president. And right now our apex court, the Constitutional Court, is embroiled in scandal as a result of a private appeal made to two of its members by a Judge President from an inferior court to rule in favour of the President in one of his corruption cases. In other words, our civil and political freedoms are at risk.
Our country has lost the moral authority and international respect it enjoyed when it became a democracy, largely because we have failed to understand the complexity of formulating foreign policy positions in our inter-connected world. We have also not utilized the expertise that resides amongst South Africans of goodwill beyond those in government. The most serious flaw in our foreign policy stances is our failure to consistently align our policies with the human rights principles of our Constitution. We have taken positions in the multilateral arena in recent years on vexed issues such as Zimbabwe, Darfur and Burma that are at variance with our human rights principles. Our global standing has also been diminished by the surrender of our country's national sovereignty to appease foreign powers such as China, demonstrated in the denial of visas to the Dalai Lama. In the African Union, we are failing to speak up clearly and unequivocally against African leaders who seek to avoid being held accountable for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.
We have come a long way from the altruism of Oliver Tambo. Twenty-five years ago, a decision to join one of the banned liberation movements was a decision to risk imprisonment or even death at the hands of an apartheid hit squad. Today a decision to join what is now the governing party is often motivated by a desire to access jobs and resources. The average member of the ANC is often in the party for the opposite reasons his or her forebears were. Self-interest has become the driving motive of many of those in positions of authority who should be focused on serving the public.
At every level, from the cabinet to local administrations, public representatives or officials, or their families, do business on the side with the very government which pays them. In the Eastern Cape province, where health and education systems are collapsing, the government's own statistics show that 8,000 public servants are both being paid by the state and earning money from private business deals with the health department. And the party, the government, the President and the State have merged into a monolith that acts with impunity. In the most blatant example of a conflation of conflicting interests, the ANC has an investment arm, called Chancellor House, which raises money for the party by entering as a black economic empowerment partner in commercial deals such as big infrastructure projects involving state-owned enterprises. The South African auditor-general tells us that in 2012 alone, over $2.5 billion of public money was wasted through corruption, negligence and incompetence - robbing citizens of vital services and denying our economy the investments it needs for us to thrive.
The consequences of these failures in governance are nowhere more apparent than in the education system. Of 1.1 million students who started school in 2001, 66 per cent or 745,000 of them had either dropped out or failed their school-leaving exam by 2012. Only 10 percent of those original 1.1 million children were eligible to go to university. In the same year, 12-year-olds attained an average 43 percent in literacy tests and 27 percent in numeracy tests.
I have said at home that our government is delivering an education worse than that provided by the apartheid government, whose system of Bantu education deliberately educated us for an inferior status in society. Many young people today can't find jobs because they can't read, they can't write and they haven't been taught to think logically. And the failures of our education system result in an under-performing economy. We don't have adequate skills to run a modern, 21st-century economy. We have about 800,000 vacancies for skilled jobs, alongside about 600,000 graduates who can't find work because their qualifications don't match the skills required.
The latest IMF reports, published on October 1st, point out that our growth has averaged 3 percent since 2009 compared to 5 percent for emerging markets overall and 4 percent for commodity exporters. The IMF predicts a 2 percent growth rate for South Africa in 2013 -- down from 2.5 percent last year -- and a rise to about 3 percent in 2014 and 3.5 percent in the medium term: this when our economists say we need to grow at least 5 percent a year to begin to reduce our unemployment rate.
An IMF survey accompanying its report adds:
"At these growth rates, the economy creates jobs, but not enough for the growing labor force and those currently without work. Unemployment remains stubbornly above 20 percent, or more than 30 percent when including those who have given up looking for a job. Youth unemployment is even higher at more than 50 percent."
And the IMF warns that an under-performing economy exacerbates unemployment and inequality, contributing to rising social tensions. It adds that households' purchasing power has stagnated over the past 20 years for those who earn the least. Even our Presidency acknowledges that the growth we have achieved has brought limited benefits to the poorest of poor people. Judged by the Gini coefficient, which measures the distribution of income within a society, and I quote from a report issued by the Presidency:
"South Africa still ranks among the most economically unequal societies in the world..."
Economists suggest the effects of this inequality are ameliorated for the poorest of poor people by social grants from the government. The 2012 survey of the South African Institute of Race Relations says that between 2001 and 2012-2013, the proportion of the population that benefited from social grants soared from 8 percent to 31 percent. But welcome as short-term measures to alleviate poverty are, this is no solution for the future.
A steadily declining proportion of economically active people in South Africa is resulting in an increasing number of dependants on government handouts. Fifteen million of our 51 million people draw some kind of social grant from the government; our deputy president warns that if that figure were to rise to 20 million, it would throw the country into a financial crisis.
An estimated 71 percent of South Africans in the 15-34 age group, who make up 60 percent of our population, are not participating in the economy. The exclusionary economic and political systems that continue to characterise the primary sectors of mining and agriculture undermine our present and future economic prospects. Workers and poor people are also the victims of the interests of privileged union leaders becoming too closely tied to those of government. A yawning gap has opened up between workers and the leaders of the unions that are in formal alliance with the governing party. This undermines not only good labour relations, but also the productivity that comes from job satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment by all workers. The tragic confrontation between police and platinum miners in Marikana in the North-West Province last year underscored the urgent need to restructure the foundations of our economy.
So why are we South Africans failing to deliver on our potential? Why are we squandering our legacy?
At its heart, I believe our problem is one of mindset. I have said that as we inaugurated democratic rule in 1994, we seriously under-estimated what it would take to walk the journey from being subjects of undemocratic governments, denied the right to make our own choices, to become citizens of a constitutional democracy, reclaiming control over our lives. We did not stop and take the time at the beginning of our journey to work on shifting our mindsets from those of compliant subjects to those of dignified citizens. Too many of us have sat back and said: "We have at last been able to vote for the government we want. Now we can sit back and the government must deliver on the promise of freedom."
But it goes further than that: we have not yet overcome the fear of which Steve Biko spoke more than 40 years ago, in 1971, when he said of black South Africans under apartheid that they "have been successfully cowed down by... brutality... " He spoke of a "fear that erodes the soul of black people in South Africa", "a fear so basic in the considered actions of black people as to make it impossible to behave like people, let alone free people."
Of course our context has changed. But we South Africans have not yet fully eradicated the demons of our past. As black people we have not yet psychologically liberated ourselves from the sense of inferiority and powerlessness which three centuries of oppression inculcated within us. And white people too have become afraid to speak up in the democratic era, in their case because their superiority complexes or their guilt constrain them from participating fully as citizens. People in poor communities say they are afraid of losing their social grants if they stand up against the governing party. Leading professionals and business people are afraid to speak their minds, and some of them are honest enough to say quite frankly that they don't want to run the risk of their businesses losing government contracts.
What are the solutions to our problems? What is to be done?
Some of you will know that I have never before been a member of a political party. I have never aspired to political office. Many of you will know that over the past year, I have concluded that the potential of civil society to bring change to our democracy after 20 years of rule by one party is limited, and that I have entered politics under the banner of a party we have named Agang South Africa, or, translated into English, Build South Africa. We will contest the national and provincial elections next year, and we will give voters a credible alternative to the ANC.
The 2009 elections showed that millions of registered voters could not bring themselves to vote for the existing parties, and there are millions more -- especially among the so-called "born frees" (those who have grown up knowing no other government than that of the ANC) -- who are so alienated from politics that they have never registered to vote. The response that AgangSA has received since our launch as a political platform in February shows that there is a huge desire in South Africa to have a political party that represents those people who have given up on the current political players.
AgangSA stands for clean government. We believe that restoring the promise of freedom is possible if we have a clean government that listens to the people and is accountable to them in a transparent manner that ensures clean, competent government of the people, by the people, for the people.
We at AgangSA have started unveiling our detailed policies, and some of our principal objectives include the following:
Economy: We want to build a restructured, competitive, thriving and inclusive economy managed by an accountable and competent leadership that will grow jobs, boost infrastructure development and create the skills needed to help diversify our economy. Key interventions include: implementing tough competition policy measures to break down monopolies and cartels which raise prices and stifle innovation in our economy; working with learning and training institutions as well as firms to create new skills development programmes to ensure that the skills of graduates match those demanded by employers; reforming and modernizing our mining and agriculture sectors by implementing sector-specific skills development programmes; cutting red tape for small businesses by relaxing regulations; and providing incentives for companies which tender for government contracts to create apprenticeship programmes to train young people.
Education: We want to build an education and training system that equips young South Africans for the challenges of the 21st century and which rei-gnites their self-confidence and hopes to be part of shaping the country of our dreams. Key policy measures include: introducing subject-specific competency tests for all teachers; providing intensive teacher training and linking pay increases to competency/qualifications; and introducing minimum standards for new teacher hires.
Public service: We want to build a clean, competent government and civil service appointed on merit and serving the public professionally without fear or favour. Key interventions include: introducing an entrance examination for all incoming public servants; undertaking a skills audit of the public service and implement programmes to develop the technical and professional skills of government officials; introducing minimum 15-year jail terms for corrupt officials and those who corrupt them; and banning government officials and their families from conducting business with the State.
Health: We want to build a health care system that will make it possible for every South African to receive quality health care, irrespective of where they live, their employment status or level of income. Crucial interventions include: increasing the number of health professionals by expanding public and private training places; re-opening nursing colleges; recruiting and rapidly accrediting foreign professionals; developing appropriate training sites (particularly in rural areas) for doctors within South Africa; and enabling the private sector to train doctors in a similar manner to that in which nurses are trained by private nursing schools.
Safety and security: We want to build a policing system that preserves security and safety, respects democratic values as expressed in our constitution, and in which citizens have confidence. Key steps include: setting up a police board to set standards for recruitment and promotion in the South African police service; tackling the worrying trend of police brutality by introducing a specific policy that contains clear guidelines for the application of disciplinary processes in all cases of police brutality; and carrying out an audit of equipment and resources at each police station in the country.
As the shareholders of our democracy, South Africans are saying that's it's time for change. AgangSA believes in the restoration of the founding principles of our democracy. We believe in placing people at the centre of the democratic process, with our main focus on empowering people to govern. South African citizens are effectively being prevented from governing by the country's electoral system. It is for this reason that we launched early this year a million signature campaign for electoral reforms that will make elected representatives more accountable to voters by strengthening the link between them. We believe that electoral reform must be the first order of business of the post-2014 election parliament.
Above all, we need to build social cohesion in South Africa. Many South Africans are imprisoned by our past, trapped in identities determined by colonialism and apartheid. For most citizens, their primary identities revolve around ethnicity, religion and economic class. We need to build a sense of common South African citizenship and make sure that Ubuntu -- which says a person is a person only through other persons -- again becomes our way of life, making every South African feel valued because they are human. We want again to rekindle the spirit that Nelson Mandela kindled in us 20 years ago, and to build the country of our dreams.
Back in 1987, Oliver Tambo issued this appeal to your community here at Georgetown:
"We would also like to convey to you something of the resolve of the despised millions of our country to be victims no longer, to emancipate themselves and to free their oppressors from the burdens that all who practise injustice impose upon themselves. It is our hope that in the difficult days ahead, you will stand with us, lending your intellectual excellence to the accomplishment of these objectives, and that using the power you derive from the discovery of the truth about racism in South Africa, you will help us to remake our part of the world into a corner of the globe of which all humanity can be proud."
Some of those objectives are being attained. But many of those millions of whom Oliver Tambo speaks have been left behind in the past 20 years. They do not feel as if they are citizens in charge of their own destinies. They need still to liberate themselves psychologically, socially and economically. Despairing of being able to change their lot, many are disillusioned with democracy, and some are attracted by dangerous rhetoric from political demagogues.
In June, President Obama made his first official visit to Africa. He came to speak to us at the University of Cape Town, where he proclaimed what he called "a new model of partnership between America and Africa" -- a partnership of equals which focuses on the capacity of Africa to solve its problems and to grow.
In the spirit of the President's outstretched hand, I want today to renew Oliver Tambo's appeal to you, and to ask you to continue to stand with us, to combine your intellectual excellence with the intellectual excellence that we have developed, to work with us -- through the School of Foreign Service, through the McCourt School of Public Service; to challenge us; and to build with us. In this way, we -- South Africa and the United States -- can serve not only the people of my country, not only your people, not only the people of Africa, but we can serve all humanity.
Thank you.
Issued by AgangSA, October 22 2013
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