Response to the State of the Nation by COPE Parliamentary Leader Dr. Mvume Dandala on the 4th June 2009 in the national assembly
Mister Speaker
The Honourable President of the Republic,
Honourable Members
The Congress of the People welcomes the opportunity to engage you on your speech and the plans of your executive. Thank you for sharing your plans with us. Many South Africans welcome and agree with your analysis of what the problems facing our country are. Where we need greater engagement is on how we shall respond to these.
I will focus particularly on the key issues of the recession, the debilitating poverty facing our people as well as the state of our education as a tool for the people to extricate themselves out of these difficulties. I commend you for reminding us that we have a nation to build together. We support this call as it at the heart of our own Agenda for Change and Hope - an agenda on whose mandate we stand here to speak, an agenda that would guide COPE in being a patriotic opposition.
RECESSION:
The prudent economic policies that South Africa pursued over the last fifteen years are in part responsible for shielding South Africa from the global economic crisis up to now. We must commend the pursuit of policies of frugality and prudence that characterized the country's macroeconomic strategy. We now know that we are in a recession and it follows, as you acknowledged, that the extent and pace of your expenditure will be limited. We hope government will not be tempted to over spend without consideration for these tough times in pursuit of targets set when the recession was not factored in.
Looking at the government's response to the recession however a few questions yearn for answers:
What is the Government's practical intervention as a response to this recession? The country is left guessing about suggestions made by some of your alliance partners to consider huge bail outs, suggestions made by others to bankroll companies and or banks in distress and so on. A clear statement in his regard needs to be made - the investor community cannot afford to be left guessing.
How are ordinary people going to be shielded and helped to survive? This goes beyond the generic mention about the social partners' consultation that would apparently stop retrenchments. This sounds already too challenging as it is ambitious. What are the details of the industries involved - can we really regard as adequate a blanket solution that would seek to simply re-train all people facing retrenchments without looking at the bigger picture, without saying how sustainable solutions for companies in distress can be found?
How are fears of ordinary people going to be addressed? Job losses, repossessions and retrenchments are the order of the day. I missed in your speech a programme that inspires confidence amongst ordinary people and how they should weather the storm in the face of repossessions by financial institutions. Is there a plan to engage these institutions in the face of high repossession rates? Is there at least a call to these institutions by government to present a plan that would shield people from their crumbling financial situations?
The timing of the decision to increase the size of government and therefore add more than a billion rand in state expenditure sends a wrong message to a country that is asking its citizens to tighten their belts when its own first act is to increase the salary bill of government. The least we would have expected is for the rationale of this decision to be explained to the nation by no less than the President himself.
Poverty
All of this happens in the face of debilitating poverty. As you correctly point out 13 million people are reliant on social grants. It cannot be right that a quarter of the population has to be reliant on grants. The unemployment rate is now officially on 30 percent. We agree with you that we need to extricate our people from this dependency. We need to hear how the government plans to create stable and decent jobs for our people. We will look closely at the promised 500 000 jobs in the next six months, hoping that these will not merely be job opportunities where a person who has worked one week here and another day there is counted as one job.
We believe that it is crucial to ensure that government intensifies the effort of building and supporting SMMEs and new enterprises. One hopes that government will also improve on the issue of timely payment of SMME's to avoid killing them. On the private sector side, the monitoring of the BBBEE legislation that forces companies to procure from SMMEs and spend resources on building new enterprises needs urgent attention. To this end we call on you to announce without delay the over-due BBBEE council.
In the past your government has produced fine ideas and plans for poverty eradication programmes such as the RDP, GEAR, ASGI-SA and JIPSA. One expected that we would hear your analysis on the impact and effect of these grand schemes. We are left with a feeling that reference to them was not made because they were not successful. Where is the follow up work on them? Or are we going to see new plans without a proper evaluation of these? What is the plan to tackle poverty on a sustained basis? How are we planning to utilize social grants and public works as stepping stones to sustainable job creation, thus dealing with systemic poverty and turning South Africans into economically self sustaining citizens?
What is the rural development strategy of this government? It is disappointing that after 15 years we still do not have a well tried and developed strategy to transform our rural areas into economically active hubs. We nevertheless welcome the pilot project in Giyane. We will watch it with baited breath and anxiety to see whether or not a whole department created to deal with this will produce what people throughout rural South Africa yearn for.
There is a need for parliament to be fully exposed to the plans to tackle poverty - here is another issue that is beyond party politics but must be the business of all of us in this house.
Nation Building
Mr. President, we welcome your call for nation building; we also need to caution that such a call cannot be made lightly anymore. COPE members in the civil service are being hounded out of their jobs. We will encourage them to use your hotline sir, to complain and ask your office to take up their plight. The harassment of Prof Pityana, Prof Nkuhlu and many others urgently calls for your intervention.
We take encouragement in the hope that the president will call on all in our nation to affirm political dissent as a fundamental right that must be defended for our democracy to thrive.
Nation building must become more than just a slogan. We welcome and embrace the Mandela day as Madiba truly belongs to all of us South Africans and people of the world. His legacy will inspire us to build tolerance.
Education
Finally we are pleased that the President has highlighted the culture of learning. We support the rallying of children to study, the rallying of teachers to teach. It is the success of education in the long run that will help our people to extricate themselves from poverty as well as lay a foundation for the building of a value centered society.
Because of the importance of education we need to invest very seriously in the infrastructure to make education a success. The phenomenon of Schools under trees for example, is an embarrassing neglect of resourcing schools - is there a plan? This matter of national concern did not make it into the speech. Is it because of fear that once again government will fail to eradicate this crisis?
Are there plans to intensify vocational education? This is the sure way to ensure young people are extricated from poverty - this is a sure way to plant a seed of entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
As we have said many times over, the problem in our country has never been policy. The state of our nation is that of despair when it comes to service delivery. That is why we welcome your determination to hold ministers accountable. It is important that the role of parliament in oversight in that regard not be compromised but be seen as a partnership to ensure delivery all round. We look forward to a discussion between your ministries of evaluation and planning about how parliament will be included to ensure overall accountability. We also hope that this focus will permeate all levels of government, particularly at local level.
We respect the choice of our people at the polls and we wish you and your government well as you implement the promises you have made. We on our part pledge to work with you as a patriotic opposition focused on giving our people hope, focusing on fighting for change.
Where you excel we will commend you where you falter we will be there to point it out and work with you to build a country where all our people can be safe and prosperous.
Issued by the Congress of the People, June 4 2009
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