Honourable MEC for Social Development, Mme Miriam Segabutla
Friends and colleagues
Members of the media
Ladies and gentlemen
Good morning everyone, and thank you for coming to the media briefing on the launch of this year's Social Development Month.
We launch the Social Development Month here today, just a few days after the successful national general council (NGC) meeting wherein the African National Congress (ANC) renewed its commitment to provide the strong leadership that South Africans expect.
The ANC committed itself to work together with all South Africans to secure our country's future prosperity. It will continue its pursuit of social solidarity policies and programmes that will contribute to the social contract of building a caring society.
Ladies and gentlemen, October is an important month in the Department of Social Development calendar. We are marking this month in order to highlight the services that the department offers and the extent to which access to these services can be reached by greater numbers of people who up until this day still suffer the indignity of deprivation, poverty and the curse of underdevelopment.
We are marking this month also to ensure that the quality of the services that are on offer are up to the standard that can fulfil the needs of our people and restore their dignity and human rights.
The implementation of our month long programme should serve to raise awareness to all our people of what it is that this department can offer them to accelerate the pace of building socially cohesive and empowered communities.
The success of this programme should therefore be underlined by the extent to which our people demand and receive social services that can enable them to contribute towards a process of empowerment and self reliance.
In his opening address to the NGC meeting, President Jacob Zuma made a clarion call for government to pursue rural development as the major component of poverty eradication. He said that rural development is an idea crying out for urgent realisation and that poverty and human needs were most deeply felt in the rural areas. He observed that any hope for attaining the goal of poverty alleviation would thus depend on development of the rural areas.
As a department whose main objective is to build an integrated system of social development services that improves the quality of life for all people, the Department of Social Development has always been concerned with poverty eradication.
The progress we have made of expanding the social safety net in the last sixteen as demonstrated in the recent country's millennium development goals (MDG) report (2010) has given rise to confidence that absolute poverty can be eradicated.
This realisation, and the knowledge that development continues to bypass so many of our people calls for an even sharper focus of our efforts and to make elimination of poverty our central focus.
In doing so, we will build on our government's success over the last sixteen years. While this success has varied, we have reduced the numbers of people experiencing the worst levels of income poverty significantly and have in fact achieved the MDG target of reducing the number of people living on less than one United States dollar a day.
Most of the achievements in reducing extreme levels of income poverty can be ascribed to government’s comprehensive social protection programme.
We will, therefore, during this month long period work with our communities, to listen and understand what their plight is but importantly to ensure that we unlock that which may serve as an obstacle in meeting their long declared need of emancipation and empowerment.
This should also serve as an opportunity to expand and strengthen our partnerships towards a more efficient and cost effective service delivery. As it is, the task of meeting our people's needs for emancipation cannot be achieved by government alone it is a function of a collaboration of business, civil society and our communities.
Social Development Month activities
Ladies and gentlemen, our month long activities include the following activities:
The International Victim Empowerment Conference, which I will address later this morning, will serve as a precursor to the Social Development Month programme.
The conference will bring together 500 delegates comprising of ministers and government representatives, policymakers, academics, activists and non-governmental organisation (NGO) representatives from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).
It will provide a unique regional platform to review progress with regard to implementation of victim empowerment programme and strengthen regional collaboration to tackle cross border crimes, particularly the growing phenomenon of human trafficking.
Despite progress made on the Victim Empowerment Programme, adequate protection for children and women against violent crimes remain a serious concern to our government including the prevalence of harmful cultural practices especially against the girl child.
The deliberations of this conference are of critical importance and will provide a major base for victim empowerment programme initiatives. The conference is organised by the Department of Social Development in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the European Commission.
In line with our government's vision of building a society for all ages, all provincial departments will participate in the Golden Games, a flagship project of the Department of Sports and Recreation that is aimed at person aged sixty years and older.
These games have generated a lot of interest from older persons throughout the country. One of the main areas of focus of the Older Persons Act 13 of 2006 that came into full operation in April this year is to provide opportunities, programmes and support to encourage older persons to participate or continue to participate in cultural, economic, political, social life and lifelong learning.
The impact of the Golden Games extends beyond sport. For us, the real value of the Golden Games is the considerable personal and social development that it brings.
The games have obvious benefits in promoting health and fitness among older persons. Like all sports, the Games contribute greatly to encouraging people to pursue an active lifestyle and it also plays a huge part in fostering intergenerational solidarity and a sense of community. It is for this reason that we call on all our people to care and protect older persons in their families and communities.
Now more than ever before, we need to ensure there is respect for older persons in our society for their sterling role as the custodians of our culture and traditions.
During the Month of October we will conduct visits to old age homes, luncheon clubs and other community facilities that cater for older persons with the view to popularise the Older Persons Act and ensure compliance.
As a caring government we are working together with the South African Older Persons Forum to improve services to older persons and we are also working hard to ensure that incidents such as the recent tragic deaths of older persons at Peter Wessels Old Age Home do not happen again. We will continue with our effort to restore the dignity and respect of our people especially the older persons.
Ladies and gentlemen, the magnitude of the drug problem in South Africa is a major cause for concern; justifiably so if you consider that children, some as young as eight years old, are in the forefront of drug abuse.
It becomes apparent that the abuse of hard drugs such as heroine, crack or cocaine and methamphetamine (tik or nyaope) demands a coordinated and highly integrated approach if the goal of creating a drug-free society is to be achieved.
To this end the Central Drug Authority (CDA), the body responsible for planning, coordinating and promoting measures to prevent and combat the scourge of substance abuse and illicit drug trafficking in the country, will launch a massive national campaign focusing on prevention and promotion of healthy lifestyles against substance abuse.
The launch of this national campaign will take place in the Northern Cape during the month of October and will be followed by similar provincial activities which will culminate in the second Biennial Substance Abuse Summit.
We are therefore calling on members of the media to join us in this important prevention campaign to raise awareness about this crime that is robbing our children of their childhood and their future.
We have to act now in raising awareness in the whole of society, we have to act now with the determination to put an end to this scourge. This is not the responsibility of government alone.
Substance abuse is a social problem that affects us all. We therefore have a shared responsibility to act that is why we are calling on our people to join this campaign.
During the month of October we will continue with the Integrated Community Registration Outreach Programme (ICROP) in all provinces so that all eligible beneficiaries of social grants are registered, and do receive their grants.
Other activities will include improving people's access to sustainable livelihoods opportunities and intensifying support programmes for orphans and vulnerable children, including child headed households.
Our government is deeply sensitive to the challenges that we face in our quest for development and social inclusion. Despite these challenges we remain determined to maintain our focus on reducing vulnerabilities and improving the life chances of the children and families who are currently struggling.
But of course to do this we need the assistance of all critical role players; business, civil society, faith based organisations and community based organisations to build new collaborative models of service delivery. With those few words I formally launch the Social Development Month.
I thank you.
