Presentation of the 2017/18 Budget Vote to the KZN Provincial Legislature by the Member of the Executive Council for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Honourable Nomusa Dube-Ncube 9 May 2017 Vote 11: Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs “Municipal And Traditional Spaces for Radical Economic Transformation”
Madam Speaker;
Deputy Speaker;
Honourable Premier;
Colleagues, Members of the Executive Council;
Honourable Members of the Provincial Legislature;
Honourable Mayors and Councillors;
Esteemed Amakhosi and Izinduna;
Members of the Diplomatic Corps;
Distinguished guests;
The people of KZN;
Madam Speaker, once more I am deeply honoured to stand before this revered House to table the Budget for Vote 11 in my capacity as the Executive Authority of the department.
Madam Speaker, celebrated poet Langston Hughes, in one of his seminal works, asks a question: “What happens to a dream deferred”?
Does it dry up?
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or does it explode?
Madam Speaker, the 2017/2018 financial year is a unique one.
This is a year in which as a nation we celebrate and honour the life of a rare leader, a revolutionary, an intellectual par excellence, a teacher, a principled and cultured person, President Oliver Reginald Tambo.
This year he would have celebrated a century of selfless struggle.
This was a struggle that was waged by men and women of Lofty thoughts and higher purpose, patriots who envisioned and dreamt of a better South Africa.
Today, Madam Speaker, as we celebrate, basking in the warmth of freedom, we cannot help but ask ourselves the question: are we still pursuing the dreams that rallied President OR behind our gigantic liberation struggle for so many decades?
Are we still on track to ensure that the dreams of our people of a better life for all are going to be realised in our life time?
We ask ourselves these pertinent questions, Madam Speaker, lest we find ourselves in the mist of dreams that are on the verge of exploding.
In tabling this Budget Vote, Madam Speaker, we seek in the main to rise to the occasion and to rectify a past that was wrong and inhumane, a past that President Tambo sacrificed his life to undo, for it had usurped all essential rights that every person in life qualifies for by virtue of being human.
Informing this Budget are pronouncements by His Excellency,
President Zuma during the State of the Nation Address, who reminded us that, having delivered basic services does not mean that we have fully realised the dreams of our forebears. Nor does it imply that we have extended various freedoms to the masses of our people.
He challenged us to radically advance the most important form of freedom that our people need in this epoch -that of radical socio-economic transformation, as part of the second phase of our transition.
This injunction was also echoed by the Honourable Premier
TW Mchunu in his State of the Province Address when he said that “through Unity in Action, we must move KZN to a prosperous future”. Full speech... [PDF]
