Greetings and respect to you Speaker, Deputy President, Honourable Members, ladies and gentlemen who are our guests in the gallery and comrades including those at home and abroad listening to this debate. You too denizens on cyberspace following our debate!
We intend to argue that we support this budget vote not only for the immediate things it undertakes to deal with, but for very crucial historical, political and economic reasons it addresses.
The central challenges of Rural Development and Land Reform are over a century old and constitute part of what defines the stubborn, persisting problematic structure of the South African economy.
It is a tragic irony that mining remains today the head ache it was over a century ago instead the opportunity it actually is and can be. Experts tell us it was the mineral and energy captains of industry who influenced the then Smuts government to introduce the 1913 Natives’ Land Act and subsequent other bad laws for indigenous people.
This law led to the destruction of the then emerging successful farming and other agricultural livelihood activities forcing Africans to work in the mines. In the then Free State it was even illegal for women whatever their status not to work as domestic workers. So people's land and animals were simply taken by force and their independent livelihood destroyed creating the national grievance that informed struggles then and now!!!
So miners were drawn from rural areas in our country and from our neighbours in Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland and Mozambique. Some of their traditional leaders became recruitment agents and leaders in mining compounds were they lived in single sex hostels. This rural urban dynamic driven by the interests of capital continues without regard to the living conditions of miners today.
The problematic property relations regime as it existed in 1994 when freedom dawned is at the heart of what needs to change and reference has already been made by the minister and other ANC speakers on progress underway. Our government has since listened to calls made at the Land Summit in 2005 and at the Polokwane conference to create a department of Rural Development and to reopen land claims. This is the ANC government has listened and is doing!
Changes in land ownership, land use and land control are a necessary obligation we have to fulfil the transformation our country economically, socially and environmentally. The knowledge that we now have in the land audit creates an even better environment for us to move swiftly to expand redistribution of land to many who are ready to use it, finalise and speed up claims on land for restitution.
Our careful, deliberate learning from the past and from others is influencing us to speed up, improve our timing, coordinate our support and responsiveness to beneficiaries of land reform and restitution including for people in communal areas. This area is work in progress. We are building relationships with a variety of knowledgeable people in universities, NGO's and improving our intergovernmental collaboration where provincial and municipal government is playing a crucial supportive role
The Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Bill now going thru hearings in the NCOP is an excellent opportunity to compliment other progressive laws to reverse apartheid spatial fragmentation, to rehabilitate destroyed fertility of the soils, and preserve our environmental resources. This bill when law will play crucial role driving the spatial agenda of development in both rural and urban areas.
Dr Makgalemele who heads spatial planning and information services in our department was correct when she observed that some of the problems in the urban areas are also because of what we are not doing or doing in the rural areas. This dynamic is an important one to be the foundation for the emerging discussion on the Integrated Urban Development Framework
Ironically although it is true that the urban, metropolitan dynamic produces economic dynamism attractive to many, it is equally true that it also creates in humane conditions that drives people back and forth to the rural areas. It is rural neglect that must not be allowed to be the additional driver of migration. The current roughly 40 percent who live in rural areas are as deserving as their urban counterpart of services others takes for granted - relatively. Now and not in some trickle down future!
Providing urban services to the rural areas - PURA - which one of India's former prime ministers writes about is as valid there as it is here in Mzanzi. Providing these services for a cluster of villages or farms is increasingly necessary to fulfill the socio-economic rights of the rural population. Support for small towns is and the work we do to provide legal services to farm workers, including land, to protect these rights needs to be handled as a package of such services!
A call for support to all farmers is certainly legitimate especially because of the work our attaches in our embassies abroad are doing to promote our products. This work is as crucial as the work we must do to ensure the environment in which these products are produced are humane and are of acceptable standard. Any continuing substandard or blatant exploitation soon rich consumers elsewhere who promptly take action to target such places. The reputation disaster that often follows should be enough reason to change!
Mr Speaker - it is appropriate at this stage to report that we are visiting each of the 23 districts identified for their high levels of poverty in two ways: first interdepartmental teams of officials visit these districts discuss the critical infrastructure needs which when provided will unleash further development, secondly we lead politically our own departmental teams to present a composite picture of the work of the department to mayors and Councillors, to traditional leaders and to relevant committees of the legislature.
The results of these exchanges provide us with crucial feedback, and enable our key stakeholders with important clarity of our intentions and challenges. This work is in addition to highly public consultative, inclusive forums where we debate policy,
