Vice Chancellor Dr Saleem Badat,
Commissioner Dolly Joiner,
Ambassadors,
Representatives from the African Union (AU)and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO),
Distinguished guests,
Delegates and friends.
It is a great pleasure to be with you and on behalf of the government of South Africa, to welcome visitors to our country, to this opening session of the Highway Africa Conference 2011. This is one Highway that is great to see so crowded.
You bring together what I am informed is the largest annual gathering of African journalists in the world and for the past fifteen years you have provided a forum to reflect on the impact of technology and media on our societies across the continent.
The past two decades have seen significant changes in the information and communication sectors, driven by rapid innovation in technologies, particularly the expansion of the personal computer and Internet, the ubiquity of mobile-phones, the growth of emails, and the emergence of social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
These changes are arguably at least as significant as the invention of radio, television and the telephone and perhaps even of printing in the history of human communication.
As is the nature of innovation, it is disruptive – challenging the way we communicate personally, challenging the traditional model of printed newspapers and magazines.
But innovation has also placed new tools in the hands of citizens and governments – tools that can improve communication and democracy.
Real, vibrant democracies need freedom of speech, a free press, governments that are held accountable for public policies and state action – or state inaction and a press that scrutinises the exercise of corporate power.
Democracies are noisy for they are about a nation in intense robust conversation with itself and with others. The changes in information and communication technologies are expanding the means available for that conversation, that engagement, ordinary citizens telling their stories.
A democratically elected Government has a responsibility to inform and communicate with the people who put it into office and the people have a right to information about the work of their government, subject only, in the words of our Bill of Rights, to limitations that are reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom.
Government is using the new technologies – websites bring stores of documents to the public, video-conferencing to conduct the business of government, hotlines to by-pass the obstructions of bureaucrats. Two years ago this week, on 14 September, government introduced a presidential hotline that has received over 110 000 queries since establishment, with, I am informed, a 75% call resolution rate.
You meet at a challenging time - a time of global economic uncertainty, following the recession of 2008 in many countries; and ten weeks prior to the convening of COP 17 here in South Africa, where countries will reflect on the challenges of climate change. The Conference theme: African media and the global sustainability challenge, is apt. There is an African story to tell to the world on sustainability, and there is a common global story to tell in Africa. The media is a vital part of telling that story.
Economic growth has stalled in parts of the world, with major fiscal, jobs and growth challenges and continuing systemic weaknesses in the global economy that questions the old models of growth – the economic sustainability dimension.
More than 150 years of industrialisation that started in Europe, based mainly on fossil-driven energy, has impacted on the climate and environment in very profound ways, with potentially devastating effects for future generations – the environmental sustainability dimension.
As we review this century and a half of industrialisation in the north from our vantage point on the continent, it is obvious that, taken as a whole, Africa had not done particularly well.
Europe’s industrialisation took place at a time when Africa was being colonised, and the continent provided Europe with minerals and other raw materials, with very little local industrialisation; leaving in its wake today large levels of rural poverty and underdevelopment, weak infrastructure and limited education.
It was a period too when the promise of freedom and development after the wars of independence and national liberation, was so cruelly dashed, subsequently, in too many cases by the crude imposition of dictatorship or coups; or the pervasive problems of poor governance and corruption.
The continent has begun however to address some of the key challenges and make real gains. Democratic governance has become more widespread. Economies have grown, in many cases, quite vigorously. Indeed, six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world in the past decade are from this continent. And IMF projections show that seven of the fastest growing economies for the next five years are expected to be African economies. But the challenge of poverty is still very large.
Colleagues and friends
The continent has the potential for a dramatic turnaround from decades of pessimism about our future and our prospects. A recent study predicted that Africa's GDP will grow by $1 trillion by 2020, driven largely by the expansion of infrastructure, agriculture and resources and growth in consumer markets.
Just the continent’s annual consumer spending alone is projected to rise by almost R4 000 billion by 2020 compared to 2008, which is more than the entire total output of South Africa - Africa's largest economy today.
For Africa to achieve these enormous growth rates and to sustain them, we require significant investment in infrastructure: in roads, rail, dams, energy generating capacity and communication systems to drive growth, jobs and development. Cities will expand as hundreds of millions of rural people move to urban areas, attracted by opportunities and pushed by rural poverty.
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) too will expand dramatically across the continent, driven by investment in communication infrastructure: witness for example what has happened to broadband costs and capacity here in South Africa through the expansion of undersea cable capacity.
But if we wish to absorb hundreds of millions of newly urbanised and young people into decent work opportunities, the continent will need to become more than simply a mining and agricultural economy that exports raw materials for processing in Asia, Europe or the Americas.
Africa will have to industrialise, to build dynamic and strong manufacturing industries, supported by sophisticated services sectors. That industrialisation will require energy, lots of it.
The challenge is: do we simply follow the carbon-intensive industrialisation path of Europe and the United States of the last 150 years, or Asia over the past 30 years? If we do, we will burn an enormous amount of fossils, and based on current emission ratios, we will contribute substantial harm to the environment.
And on the scientific evidence before us, we and our children and their children will pay a very high price through crop failure, water scarcity, rising sea levels, heat waves, storms, floods and droughts. That is a dramatic story to tell, one in which journalists can help to build a mass constituency for green policies.
So we are faced with the challenge to industrialise, yes, but under conditions in which we need to balance growth with ecological sustainability.
The enormous advances in technology allow us today to tap the power of the sun, the wind and the rivers to create energy that is clean and green.
In the process, we can also create large numbers of green jobs.
Opportunities arise in many areas. They embrace the building and operation of large solar, hydro and wind energy plants. But they also include production of new energy-efficient materials and green manufacturing operations, from cars to green household utensils such as cooking stoves, lighting and heating systems. They refer to the opportunities in eco-tourism, environmental reclamation projects and waste-management.
We are now identifying viable opportunities that can be carried out locally and marshalling the investment to capture our share of global green jobs. It is part of our integrated jobs plan which we call the New Growth Path, a programme that seeks to place employment at the centre of our economic policies, expand our industrial sectors, develop the green economy and promote rural development.
We set a target that more than one third of new energy should be from renewable sources: more than 17 000 MW of green energy. That is about three times the current total installed electricity generation capacity of Nigeria and bigger than the total generation of energy from most countries on the continent.
There are a number of important stories to tell about what we are doing on the energy front.
Let me headline a few:
We have installed 140 000 solar-water heating units locally to provide hot water to households, largely to poor families, using a portion of the coal- based electricity tariff to co-finance this. Our goal is to increase this to one million units by 2015 and to manufacture more of the components locally.
When you visit the townships where these solar-water geysers have been installed, you see the concrete evidence of opportunity that the green economy can bring.
South Africa currently produces about 15% of the world’s auto-catalytic converters, which help to reduce carbon-emissions from fuel-based vehicles, using a locally-mined platinum input. We have developed an electric motor vehicle to prototype stage, using local technologies and know-how.
We have set up a $3 billion fund through a public investment corporation, the IDC, to co-finance industrial activities in the green economy.
We are investigating a new standard for the fuel used in vehicles on our roads, to mandate a blend of renewable and fossil-based fuels, recognising that the feedstock required to produce the renewable fuel can create tens of thousands of jobs in the agricultural sector.
Indeed, our research show that the green economy can create some 300 000 jobs in South Africa by 2020. Investments in mass public transport systems that reduced reliance on car ownership and use and the shift to rail-transport for the movement of goods, can contribute greatly to reduction in carbon-emissions.
Of course, to achieve our goals, we need to also tap into the resources of the private sector, a key driver of investment and entrepreneurship in the green economy. The opportunities to bring new players into the economy, to promote small businesses and cooperatives, to provide economic opportunity in rural areas, have to be seized.
We are exploring a social pact on the green economy in South Africa with organised business, the labour movement, community formations and government, that will cover amongst others skills development, small business promotion, youth employment and financing mechanisms.
Creating this green economy will require effort, resources and political will. It should be pursued across the continent, as a collaborative project between countries that can promote economic development, strengthen economic ties and deepen the continent’s industrial capacity.
The rest of the world can help us, not as an act of charity but on the recognition:
- that based on today’s technologies, a green-led industrialisation will cost more in the short-term than a coal-based growth model;
- that a continent with big development deficits cannot be expected to pay the price for the unsustainable practices over the past 150 years in today’s developed economies;
- that Africa currently emits substantially less carbons per capita than most parts of the world and that this continent therefore helps to bring down the average per capita emissions globally.
We need funding and technology transfers on the scale that will help to drive a major wave of green industrialisation on the continent. That is the challenge we put to our friends and global partners. This is one of the key issues that will arise at the COP17 talks. But we can and should also do more ourselves as a continent, ensuring an
African contribution to greening our economies:
The Congo River and particularly its Inga Falls, is potentially an enormous source of green, renewable energy, almost equal to the total electricity generated in South Africa, and produced at a cost that is lower than competing technologies. If we can tap the power of that river – and the challenges are not primarily engineering or financial – we can create a cheap and clean source of energy to drive economic growth and industrialisation in a number of countries in the region.
We must recognise that while we focus on green energy, we have significant deposits of coal, oil and gas on the continent. Africa cannot walk away from coal as a cheap source of energy, but we can ensure that we invest and partner in green energy to mitigate the effects of coal and that we adapt technologies to reduce the carbon impact of coal, including carbon capture and storage and more efficient coal-power technologies.
On our continent, the default option of energy for hundreds of millions of people is not electricity accessed with the flick of a switch, but instead energy from wood, charcoal and coal, as well as paraffin and gas.
The evidence is compelling that smoke from solid-fuel use by poor households contribute to large numbers of deaths from child pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer. Indeed, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) / World Health Organisation (WHO) study estimates that about half a million people die annually on the continent as a result of indoor air pollution that arise from solid fuel use. Half a million people – that is equivalent to losing the entire population of Copenhagen in Denmark, every year.
Collection of firewood still trap millions of women in daily drudgery and its use for cooking and heating can contribute to deforestation and soil erosion, which is not only bad for the environment but also contributes to creating conditions that deepen poverty.
For all these reasons and more, the switch to green technologies, including green cooking stoves, can have very substantial economic development, health and welfare benefits in the lives of families and communities. In order to fully reap the dividends of these technologies however, Africa should not only consume these, but also need to produce these locally and on scale, creating manufacturing enterprises that produce for the large market on the continent.
This is Africa’s story that must emerge at COP17, a continent that is seizing the moment to address the development challenges of our times, with green technologies.
Your Conference will no doubt, identify many other parts of the African story that need to be told.
I wish you a very productive conference.
