President of CONTRALESA and your Executive Committee
Our esteemed guests, traditional Leaders from Zimbabwe and Botswana; a hearty welcome to you!!
Other Traditional leaders in your hierarchies
Chairperson of the National Khoi-San Council (NKC) and your Councillors
Chairperson of the National Interfaith Council of South Africa (NICSA)
Director-General of Department of Cooperative Governance Mr Vusi Madonsela and other senior public servants.
Ladies and gentlemen,
His Excellency, the President, Mr Zuma has today raised very serious issues that require our urgent attention. He has made a clarion call to the nation on the relationships that have to be created going forward amongst the traditional leadership institutions, the governance structures, business and the people of South Africa. Most injunctions, as you have heard, are not new, but are affirmations of what we always knew, or ought to have known. These are things that should have been done. The President focused on three critical issues: nation building, food security and indigenous heritage.
The President, once again, confirmed that for us as a people to move forward, we need to be reminded of our past, or to learn our history, reconnect with our current cardinals and compass - that is where we are today, in order to find our path to our destination. We must therefore know who we are, our history and where we are heading. Surely, we do not deserve the Christopher Columbus Award. These awards are given to people who do not know who they are, where they are, and when they get there they will not even know that they have arrived.
We as the generation that is alive today and we commit to emulate the value, steadfastness and resoluteness of those who came before us, our forebears. We must vow that we shall do as they did, and even more to ensure that we succeed despite the odds and the intervening historical turmoil of over five hundred years of colonialism and later apartheid. We are, to our advantage, endowed with better and more resources than our predecessors could ever have imagined. Our future and destiny, ladies and gentlemen, is in our hands.
Kgosi Maubane,
The biggest enemy of our people remains the scourge of unemployment and lack of opportunities for self-sustenance by our people, all of which lead to the abject poverty and social inequalities that are all about us. These challenges call for creative leadership at all levels - at the village, in the church or synagogue or in school – a leadership that can rise to the occasion through leading and inspiring hope amongst the people it leads. Traditional leaders are now, more than ever before, called upon to lead by example and from the front.
As it has been said, the massive migration of our economically active people from villages to the urban centres poses a long term threat to the food security of our country. Any society that has to survive must be able to produce its own food through working the land.
It is therefore trite that we reiterate the call for traditional leaders to marshal their communities back to the land to plough and produce food through the subsistence farming. Government through its various land reform and redistribution programmes is ready to ensure that those who can, and show potential and determination, are assisted to graduate into formal commercial farming. This is critical for all our livelihood and sustainability as a nation.
Ladies and gentlemen, oNdabezitha
Beyond crop farming, our people are also presented with opportunities to acquire land through similar land redistribution mechanisms to rear cattle and other livestock. The opportunities are abound and it is for our traditional leaders to inspire all of us, as your subjects, to see and take up the opportunities for our own sake.
The Chairperson of the National House, VhaMsanda
Opportunities for local economic development (LED) are boundless. The traditional healers have raised a concern that with veldt-fires, drought and limited land surface due to competing land use demands, they are finding it hard to yield good harvests of the medicinal herbs. This calls for creative ways of reviving the plantations, grow them through medicinal gardens. These gardens should assist in keeping your trade going, but they must also be grown with a view towards a possibility of developing cooperatives for medicinal agro-processing plants. Traditional healers need to patent and share their knowledge for it may become extinct with time.
The time has come for African traditional medicines to be standardised and processed into tablets, capsules and into bottled medicines. The need for collaboration between established patriotic pharmaceuticals and traditional healers is critical in order to ascertain the efficacy of some medicines, affirm and certify others and to then market them as alternative or additional medicines in the global market. Africa’s time has come and we can push the world’s medicinal knowledge to new heights given the fact that we, as the African continent, still have unexploited forests and indigenous knowledge systems that are hitherto unknown to the world.
I have been assured that the House has repositioned itself to rise to the challenge and that you have developed plans that will put you as the fulcrum of local community development. Your programme on cultural tourism has indeed attracted our attention as you seek to unearth the ancient shrines and catacombs, the graves of your forebears hidden in caves in the bellies of our mountain ranges. The places of great sacrifices, our common hecatombs, are lying derelict and are in need of preservation to bolster domestic tourism as people are eager to see where epic resistance battles were fought, how your ancestors worshipped, their arts and any depictions of their ancient lives.
In one of his expeditions on the Lion’s Head on the Table Mountain range, the explorer and archeo-astrologer Dr Dean Liprini was overwhelmed when he found evidence of ancient San and Khoi knowledge of astronomy on the Cape Peninsula. He had this to say in his book titled “Pathways of the Sun – Unveiling the Mysteries of Table Mountain and beyond” and I quote: “As I entered the narrow passageway through the grouping of large granite boulders, I was filled with a sense of antiquity a feeling that I was walking on the footsteps of others who had lived long before. As I crept through the steep-sided rock corridor, I came across a small three sided rock pedestal. Standing on its flattened top step, I gazed upwards in awe. There it was – balanced on two great boulders, a huge granite rock shaped like a human head, facing south towards the Atlantic. Through it pierced two ‘eyes’, gazing up to the sky above. In wonder I turned to my hiking companion and said, ‘This is the Stone Age telescope.”
Sites similar in significance to the ones along the Table Mountain range are found elsewhere in the interior and the outskirts of the country. Similarly, as articulated by the President this morning, the recent graves of your ancestors can also be developed for local tourism as you need to tell your stories and histories, both ancient and recent.
Out of such initiatives across the country, we will indeed grow jobs for our youth as tour guides, translators, and other entrepreneurs that will emerge as local people interact with the peregrinating visitors.
Mr Cecil Le Fleur, the Executive Committee of the NKC,
I am pleased that the Khoi and San leadership under the National Khoi-San Council (NKC) is with us today. We are saddened by the group from the Khoi-San community who had to walk for more than 400 km from Mossel Bay to Cape Town last week in an attempt to make their voices heard. We want to take this opportunity to reiterate the fact that this is your government and your Department of Traditional Affairs – it listens and it will continue to listen attentively.
We will find an opportunity to visit the Khoi-San communities around Mossel Bay and other places to reassure them that they need not walk all the way to access government. We will come to them as their servants. We intend to interact with you directly in collaboration with the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform to process the pre-1913 land claims, an opportunity that the ANC government has created for your communities who were the first to encounter colonial terrorism and subjugation.
Your victories 500 years ago against colonial invasions like the Saldanha and others are recorded. We will develop programmes to integrate these commemorations and celebrations of the Khoi and San battles and victories into the general cultural events calendar of the Department of Traditional Affairs.
Kgosi Maubane and the leadership of the House,
Our people continue to be ravaged by the killer disease of HIV and Aids. Rural areas are not spared. Despite the roll-out of anti-retro-virals and HIV and AIDS prevention messages, young and old people alike, our kith and kin, continue to get infected with the virus. This calls for the intensification of the prevention messages among the population, particularly the youth, and to spread and further expedite the distribution of medication to those already infected.
The stigma and discrimination against those infected continues to discourage disclosure and willingness to attend voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) clinics set up by the Department of Health throughout the country. We encourage our traditional leaders in their councils to become HIV and AIDS ambassadors and help to spread the message. Your positions and stature in your communities will drive the message to all and will help to eliminate the stigma and discrimination against those infected and directly affected, for we are all affected.
We are further worried by the scourge of rape and general abuse of women and children among our communities. We are looking forward to the traditional leaders taking the lead in combating this spate of attacks and bestial tendencies. The twin scourge accompanying the violent crime spree against the vulnerable in our midst is that of drug and substance abuse that has turned our youth into monsters and sadists incapable of distinguishing good from bad, and benevolent from malevolent.
Programme Director,
Education remains the key for the future of our society. It is in this context that we are imploring on our communities and traditional leaders alike to ensure that no petulant and truant child roams the streets during school hours, and parents just look away. We know the maxim that “every child is my child” and that it takes a village to raise a child. Intervene on the spot, and if needs be – do a citizen arrest.
Reverend Matebisi and the NICSA Executive,
The National Interfaith Council of South Africa (NICSA)’s formation and launch during 2012 has been a major leap in the project of nation building and social cohesion. Beyond uniting various faiths, we are looking forward to hearing a collective voice of the faith communities on issues that affect our people. Whenever the rights of religious people or communities are infringed, we want to hear your voices loud and clear. I am pleased that you are now developing a programme that will identify and promote the religious heritage sites across the country that will ultimately be projected and protected as we honour the role the religious communities have played in the fight against past injustices and in the reconstruction and development of this country.
The current meat scandal has, as you know very serious impact on your constituency, particularly for those to whom certain flesh is “an abomination” in terms of the Bible or the Q’uran or the Laws of Moses in general. We convey, in advance, our regret to the Zionists, the Jewish, the Moslem, that is through their Bishops, Rabbi’s and the Imams, and all other faith groups and members of the general public who have been unwittingly and unknowingly made to eat “unclean flesh”. I hope that both NICSA and the CRL Commission, together with the DTA and government in general will be interested in soiling their hands by joining in the further investigations of these matters to get to the root of the controversy.
We believe that working together as NICSA, the NHTL and the entire government, we will be able to intervene in the social ills afflicting our country. We are looking forward to seeing the African Indigenous Churches rising and being in the forefront of the struggle against disease and poverty and working with our traditional leaders to address some of the challenges I have alluded to earlier.
Chairperson,
In my interactions with some traditional leaders, I was told that some of the laws we pass are written in English and legalese, both foreign languages to most of them. Our traditional leaders must always be supported to deal with these laws. We should find means to urgently translate and interpret all the new laws that Parliament passes. It must never be assumed that whenever and immediately after a headman or senior traditional leader is inaugurated, he or she immediately and magically becomes an expert in law and administration. There must be deliberate programmes to empower them in order to make it possible for them to interact with government intelligently.
The Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims (CTLDC) is on course to complete all outstanding claims and disputes. We are envisaging an integrated traditional leadership institution free of jostling and shoving amongst the royal families for the position of a senior traditional leader or king. Going forward, clear genealogies and profiles will be drawn to facilitate seamless succession and reign by those appointed.
Let us allow the legal processes to unfold for there to be a permanent stability as one Englishman, Mr Bracton once said in 1310 that “the king ought not to be under any man, but he ought to be under God and the law since the law makes the King.”
In the same vein, the Sotho man says: “ntlo-lerole ga e tswale kgosi!” - being a call for peace and cooperation amongst his kinsmen and kindred in order to move traditional leadership (bogosi) and the community forward and at peace with itself.
I wish you well in the new 2013 political year, and hope that we will emerge triumphant against want and lack.
I thank you!
