Speech by the Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) Hon. Thandi Modise on the occasion of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) fourth World Speakers Conference, United Nations, New York - Theme: Placing democracy at the service of peace and sustainable development: Building the world the people want
Fellow Speakers,
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Fifteen years ago the world pursued the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) to eradicate extreme poverty and appalling social ills. Agenda 2030 marks a paradigm shift as it completes the fragmentary business of the MDGs and lifts the level of ambition and tackles emerging issues and challenges.
Chairperson, the concept of democracy means ‘rule by the people’, and if we believe this, we as speakers and presiding officers must then take the responsibility to uphold and to encourage public education and make sure that the people are represented and have a say in the running of their state and government.
We must ensure good governance, and that governance is accountability across the parliaments, across the nations and so that the people we represent surely begin to see and have a sense on what we are saying. But we are not head of states and we are not ministers of defence. We cannot actively stop the conflicts, we can encourage our nations though, with programmes that comes out of parliaments to run programmes within cities, within wards that will educate our people. We must pick up actually signal warning of potential conflict areas.
Chairperson I am tired of getting into an aeroplane every time and be told to contribute, it does not make sense because there is a child somewhere who is hungry, who does not have shelter and who does not have education. Surely parliaments can get themselves structured in such a way that these continued deprivation of future generations of the world are better take us through.
Surely we want to look at a world which is not only representatives in speaking politics but that picks up on every issue that reflects the child the women, the man in the street.
Surely we must teach our people and teach ourselves the respect for human rights, the rule of law, effective people’s participation that will help us increase social cohesion that we so surely need these days. Surely the accountable processes that we need must go with institutions which will hopefully be building communities, but importantly institutions and civil society which will be able to dominate and speak to us as politicians.
The world we want chairperson, is the world that must protect everybody through their communal, national and international laws. The world we want is the world that must ensure that government serve people.
The world we want is the world that will ensure that we will not see warships, trucks full of people dying running away from their own countries to seek either better economic or political asylum elsewhere.
The world we want is the world that will encourage national government to ensure that national resources are shared openly and transparently and featured into all citizens. The world we want is the world that will ensure that the girl child get as much opportunity for education as the boy child.
The world we want is not the world that is represented by male dominance, it is a world that is represented by people centric policies and gender sensitive approaches.
Chairperson we believe that, we must then need strong multilateral instrument, the African Union, the United Nations. We do want to agree and support the notion that says it is high time we looked at the transformation of the United Nations so that it begins to protect the little men and the little women in the street in the village who knows nothing. It begins to really protect what it said out to do in the beginning.
We also believe that should be nobody, no child should not be able to dream and realize their dreams because somebody somewhere is taking them into forced soldier business, into forced sale sex slavery, into forced whatever it is that Boko Haram and Al-shabab is doing to our children.
We believe that as parliament we need to come together and say these problems don’t belong to a certain country. We want to say that we need to begin to walk the talk make sure that children everywhere in the world are protected.
I want to encourage fellow legislators to go back home to look at how we can begin to restructure and resource Parliament to deal with the current challenges that are being faced and our people face. Because is one thing to sit here and talk about what we need to, and not look at how we are restructured a resource as parliament in our respected countries.
It is also important for us to begin to look at the what powers different parliament who are members of the IPU have and begin to exploiting those powers so that we can begin to do what our people need.
So we need the world that has good faith, cooperation, trust, and coordination, mutual respect and the respect of the rule of law.
As we embark on the Agenda 2030 let puts our people at the centre of development as the post SDG’s stipulates. Let us aims to foster human well-being, prosperity, peace and justice together with the respect for the human rights of all people and gender equality.
I thank you!
