Speech by the Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Mr Buti Manamela, on the occasion of the Presidency Budget Vote (Vote 1) Debate  National Assembly, Parliament of South Africa

31 May 2017

Speaker of the National Assembly
His Excellency, President Jacob Zuma
Honourable Deputy President, Mr Cyril Ramaphosa
Ministers and Deputy Ministers
Honourable Members
Ladies and gentlemen
Fellow South Africans

Honourable Members, the Presidential Working Group on Youth is a strategic platform for Government, the private sector and civil society to have a strategic conversation on how to implement youth development interventions and to discuss collective action and accelerate the empowerment of young people as provided for in the National Youth Policy 2020 and other government policies.  The Committee of 17 Deputy Ministers monitors the work of the 5 work streams that are aligned to each of the five strategic priorities of the National Youth Policy 2020. 

In this financial year, the National Youth Development Agency Amendment bill will be tabled.  The amendment bill will streamline the focus of the Agency as well as introduce institutional mechanisms for strengthening youth development at a provincial and local level.  This is important if we want to ensure that our youth development investments go to where it is most needed. 

The President has mentioned the progress that the Presidential Task Team on the Creative Industries has made in addressing the issues that artists face.  The task team has ongoing interaction with the music industry to ensure that the long standing unpaid needle-time bill gets paid to local artists.

Honourable Speaker, earlier this year, the Democratic Alliance government in the Western Cape sold land, that was for social housing, to a private school, the Trafalger Intermediary School, for R135 million. The 1,7 hectares property, which can build more than 270 social housing units housing a possible 2000 people, will now be a subject of judicial contest.

The National Department of Human Settlements, together with NGO’s Ndifuna Ukwazi  and Reclaim the City intend to appeal to the conscience of the leader of the DA, Madam Zille, to instead use the land for the benefit of the majority. Whether the court case will be won by the national government on behalf of a people that is continuously excluded from the social spaces of the city will be a matter for another day.

However, the politics of this case reveals a lot more than what meets the eye. It is clear that Helen Zille is committed to maintaining the colonial spatial development setup that was imposed by the apartheid regime that continues to balkanise and keep black people in Gugulethu and Khayelitsha whilst keeping areas such as Sea Point and Camps Bay to the exclusion of the Cape Town white and rich class. We ask the question, are they children of a lesser god?

This will keep the status quo in terms of economic and other forms of development as Helen Zille and the entire DA pay lip-service to transformation, integration and change. There is little or no land available for integration, so that more and more people are settled next to where they work, eat and pray.

Although the DA is willing to integrate with black people in their political party, even give them leadership position, it is clear that this integration will only end here and cannot include the integration of their voters into single communities. We ask the question, are they children of a lesser god?

The ANC government is prepared to fight this to the end and instead of going to the courts for wily and deceitful purposes of stealing power, we will go to the courts in order to ensure that development benefits the people.

However, Honorable Speaker, this is not the only time that the DA has conformed with practices that suggest that theirs is to maintain the colonial and apartheid set-up and resist transformation. In the same period that Helen Zille was fighting tooth and nail with the communities who wanted to be integrated into the technically white’s only Sea Point, she was also tweeting up a storm about the history of colonialism and the need to defend its positive aspects.

Much to the embarrassment of the leader of the DA, Mmusi Maimane, and a couple of angry young tweeps from the DA bench, she has since withdrawn the tweet through an even longer but more embarrassing article that was widely circulated in the media.

The problem with those who condemned Zille for her Twitter verses was not because they disagree with her, but because she stated them so publicly and as usual, was exposed by the whole country for her double standards.

She who led the DA for that long--and therefore the DA itself--believes that there was some good that came from being colonized, racially segregated, imprisoned, shipped to the Americas and Europe to begin their development, killed if we resisted, dispossessed of our land and livestock, forced to work in the mines and factories for a pittance, had our mineral resources exported to far away lands to build imposing cathedrals and shiny golden pavements that symbolized their development and our underdevelopment, that this is the good story of colonialism and apartheid that replaced our barbarism.

I include the DA in Zille’s madness of colonial and apartheid glorification because if they do not repeat her bamboozled theories of ‘building on the foundation of colonial development’, they then resort to repeat policies of the ANC as their alternative to a better South Africa as we have showed elsewhere and was repeated here today least of all by their leader. But equally, the DA’s divided anger towards Zille’s colonialism tweets is less about its reflection on their policies, which they still hold dearly as I will show, and more about being pressured to respond and take her to task.

There are contentious colonial contours that Helen Zille should face consequences for, and the DA should be taken to task about, which have been repeated as daily truth and which were even in the DA’s Election’s Manifesto.

Firstly, In South Africa, transformation equals BBBEE, which for Helen Zille means Bribe Based Black Economic Empowerment and is only for the elite and politically connected. How many times have we heard the DA repeat this slogan here in this house where for them economically empowering black people is equal and inherent to corruption?  This is almost always criminal.

For them, every black person that has been economically empowered by this government should be thrown shade at, treated as a suspect and even if they are making a difference in their communities, they should be investigated.

Secondly, For Helen Zille, and consequently for the DA, what value is freedom when it can unleash virulent and violent black youth into our communities to rob, rape and rummage their peaceful suburbs apart. She asks, in her diatribe that defends her tweets, ‘how much does our freedom rating mean when we cannot even get the rudimentary criminal justice pipeline functioning’.

I tell you now Helen Zille, this freedom that we have means we cannot be stopped and asked randomly for our passbooks, or be forced into cheap labour, or be imprisoned for our political views, or be removed forcefully into some outskirt settlement to give way to the a new white settlement, or many other freedoms that you may have taken for granted in the past.

But more importantly, Speaker, to disconnect the crime that all communities suffer from the vestiges of colonialism is disingenuous. To venerate the successes of colonialism and apartheid and apportion their failures to the new government is duplicitous. Colonialism condemned young, especially African men into the lives of criminality, leaving them without entrepreneurial or work related skills. This condemnation will linger with us for generations to come, as long as the structure of the economy remains the same.

Honourable Mmusi Maimane here may be the atypical African male oozing success, with his polished and multiple English accents, posh job handed over to him of being leader of the opposition, and may be lucky to have changed the discourse for his children and grandchildren in a way his parents may not have imagined, but without justifying crime, post-colonialism was not as kind to all of us. The policy of the DA is that we should all be given equal opportunities, but those opportunities, in this country, may never be the same and equal for a very long time.

Minister Mbalula here has multiplied his efforts to fight crime, and will not use the excuse of the legacy of apartheid and colonialism in this fight against crime, but we cannot discount the fact that the pretty and praised side of colonialism have created this monstrous young black man we are today moaning about.

Thirdly, Helen Zille insists that we should build on the institutions and foundations the colonists have left, as did Singapore. These institution, I presume, she refers to the wealth of this country, the judiciary, infrastructure, land etc. I cannot even believe that she has made this suggestion that we should learn these lessons. Firstly, in our case, the colonists have not left, they are here with us, and their grand children and great-grandchildren are still even in this house defending their legacy.

If you look at the ownership patterns of land, the colonists have not left that to the natives, they still own the land. If you look at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the richest people are still Oppenheimer, Rupert, Wiese, Bekker, Gray and only then do you have a Motsepe. Although the face of the judiciary has changed, the one you want us to celebrate, thousand of South Africans still believe that this is a justice system for the wealthy.

Part of the mantra that the DA spreads day in and day out is for the protection of private property as a means to ensure investor confidence and create jobs. This essentially is about protecting the status quo, maintaining apartheid patterns of ownership and dancing to the colonial tune of their master.

If you truly want change, do not only advocate for change here in parliament, but also in the stock exchange, in communities were our people live, in land ownership and in control of the wealth of this country. You call this populism and suggest that it will lead to South Africa being a pauper state, however, this is the real transformation our people are looking for.

Finally, Helen Zille and the DA believes that in order to ensure development in our country, we should deal with the trade unions just as they did in Singapore, or what Honourable Maimane refers to as the tyranny of the trade unions.

But they forget that, this was the same strategy that was used by the colonisers who suppressed any form of worker’s resistance and protests. Every time here, the DA complains especially about SADTU, NEHAWU and COSATU in general

As Madame Zille complains about ‘not landing on time through SAA, or Madame Zille being given tea without milk at the airport, or Madame Zille’s newspaper not being delivered on time, the people in Nyanga and Khayelitsha do not have these luxurious problems and the government is focused on attending to their real challenges. We will continue building houses where to provide shelter, connect millions to the electricity grid, build decent road infrastructure especially in our communities, delivering houses, providing schools and bettering the education system, opening new clinics and ensuring a quality basic health-care and as we have done, add on more universities to better improve the chances of young South Africans.

Honourable Speaker, yesterday the DA through its leader, Mmusi Maimane, again laid charges against the ANC President. This is permitted in a free South Africa and it shows how far we have progressed in transforming our society.

But something interesting and yet unsurprising happened today. Honourable Maimane used Parliament as he does with all other political platforms as foreplay to prepare for the consummation of their marriage with the judicial system.

Most, if not all political parties seem to be substituting hard political work and interaction with constituencies, together with debate and engagement in this house, for jurisprudential convenience. We are witnessing how some political parties are trying to win through the courts a majority that they lost during the elections in 2014.

Let me conclude by reminding the Honourable Maimane that he has not succeeded in his regime change plan for South Africa. The voters have consistently rejected this.  In spite of this lack of success, he then travels to Zambia to implement regime change there. We are sorry that you were kicked out. But we are more sorry that Patriotic Front used words such as ‘Zambia is not for sale to the highest bidder’, referring to you as ‘mouthpieces of capital masquerading as political messiahs of our people’, referring to the DA as gaving ‘championed and benefitted from the notorious apartheid regime’. They even refer you as the ‘Black Token to reverse the gains of freedom against apartheid’.

I know a place where you and I can spent time and give messages of solidarity without you being called a ‘black token’ or returned from the airport. We can take some journalists on a joyride and display what is being done to the people’s of Palestine or the people of Western Sahara, who have been oppressed and essentially colonised for years and suspects that the DA does not care for them. Let me know if Helen agrees.

Honourable members, the noise out there, especially from the opposition benches, can be deafening and threatens to side-track our development efforts. But the Presidency will not be side-tracked by this.  Our work, as the nerve centre of government is too important. We will continue to give direction, cajole, reprimand and guide government departments towards the effective implementation of the NDP.  The NDP carries our hopes and aspirations for a better South Africa. This Presidency Budget for 2017-18 is directed at moving the NDP and South Africa forward. 

I thank you.

Issued by The Presidency, 31 May 2017