E Molewa: Commonwealth Countries Postal Administrators
Conference

25 July 2006

Programme Director,
MEC for Economic Development and Tourism, honourable Darkie Africa,
Executive Mayor of the Bojanala Platinum District, Cllr R Motsepe,
Chairperson of the Commonwealth Countries Postal Administrators, Mr Twiggs
Xiphu,
General Manager of Government and International Relations of the South Africa
Post Office, Mr Shadrack Ganda,
Representatives and delegations from all CCPA member nations,
Our partners in business and organised labour,
Distinguished guests and delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen:

It is an immense pleasure and privilege for me to welcome visitors to the
province, a cross section of postal administrators present here as well as all
delegates to this historical Commonwealth Countries Postal Administrators
(CCPA) Conference today.

We must register our gratitude and pride from the outset then that in the
entire 17-year history of the CCPA, the South African Post Office (SAPO) today
becomes the first African postal administration to host this mammoth imbizo of
Commonwealth postal nations.

I am especially delighted that the history being made today happens here at
Sun City in the platinum province, hence my pleasant task of welcoming all
delegates, visitors and postal administrators from across the Commonwealth into
the North West province and in South Africa.

Writing about the African people’s disdain for uncertainty and their desire
to defeat a chaotic world, 35-year old contemporary Kenyan writer and winner of
the Caine Prize in Literature, Binyavanga Wainaina offers this prose:

“If there is a miracle in the idea of life it is this; that we are able to
exist for a time in defiance of chaos. We live the rest of our lives with the
utter knowledge that there is something deliberate, a vein in us that
transports everything into place if we follow the stepping stones of
certainty.”

I believe that the post office forms an essential component of the social
and economic fabric of our country and of our developing continent of
Africa.

Who among the delegates here cannot remember the glee and zeal with which we
fetched and dispatched letters from the post office, ensuring continued
communication with our distant relatives and loved ones?

For us as Africans the post office has been an indispensable means of
communication and a critical source of essential services like pensions,
grants, identity documents as well as other important transactions that are
instrumental in the lives of citizens.

However, that we meet today in the 21st century, Africa’s century, means
that the role of the post office has evolved considerably to take into
cognisance the advances in technological development generally and the ever
dynamic nature of our societies and their challenges in particular.

Among other things this means that more than ever before the post office
stands a bigger chance to provide our rapidly growing economy with integrated
solutions in the crucial postal areas of mail, logistics, communications and
government services.

So it is that in South Africa of today the post office is government’s
preferred partner in service delivery and it forms the biggest service network
with more than 2 000 outlets nationwide, spanning all nine provinces. This
unparalleled network allows our post office to reach the urban and rural
citizen located in the most remote parts of our country, enabling them to
access such government services as grants, pensions and various critical
documents like identity documents (IDs) and driver’s licences.

In addition to this our post office like the rest of the Commonwealth, faces
the ever increasing challenges of technological substitution of globalisation,
increasing pressures of de-regulation, growing customer expectations as well as
general competition.

As this year’s theme of “Showcasing Africa” suggests, this Conference of
Commonwealth Postal Administrators (CCPA) must pay particular attention to
issues affecting African postal administration while looking to establish
further joint venture partnerships with the major trading partners of the
Commonwealth of Nations.

Over the next few days, we will particularly be interested in interacting in
full with the close to hundred member nations of CCPA including Great Britain,
Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and our brothers and
sisters from the Caribbean, the continent of Africa and the Diaspora.

In these interactions we will be looking to engage each other robustly
around challenges of enhancing postal technology, critically examining the
current landscape of postal operators, postal development and future
challenges.

I am certain that all of us are eager to exploit this historical CCPA
conference as a forum to discuss matters of mutual interest and facilitate the
much-needed exchange of ideas and best practices among member nations.

While you are busy deliberating on all these important matters, I must also
urge you not to ignore the ambience, the beauty and the hospitality of the
North West province.

For how can any of you go home without imbibing yourself with the culture
and heritage of the platinum province as manifested in its people, its rivers
and valleys, its incredible wildlife and wealth of mineral resources?

You have all come to the province and the country in which as President
Thabo Mbeki so eloquently put it, “we have conceded equal citizenship of our
country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena,
the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.”

I have no doubt that when you leave this province at the end of the
conference you will go on to become very important and trusted ambassadors of
our province and our beloved country South Africa.

The ties that will be forged in this 14th CCPA conference will no doubt be
cemented further as we prepare to host another first in Africa, the 24th
Universal Postal Union Congress in Nairobi, Kenya in 2008.

Finally, let me once again welcome you to this our platinum province and our
beloved country South Africa. May you have a resoundingly successful conference
that will take all the existing member nations’ postal services to a higher
pedestal of growth, efficiency and prosperity.

Through our post offices, let us defy chaos and create order and certainty
as Binyavanga Wainaina says we are prone to do. Let us allow that vein in us
that transports everything into place to reign supreme. Let us together build
better societies, strong communities and prosperous economies through the
services our post offices provide.

I wish you a fruitful Commonwealth Countries Postal Administrators
Conference.

I thank you!

Issued by: Office of the Premier, North West Provincial Government
25 July 2006