Wesbank / Proudly South African Home-grown Awards, Fourways
24 May 2007
Programme Director
Deputy Minister of the Department of Trade and Industry, Ms Elizabeth
Thabethe
Chairperson of Proudly South Africa, Advocate Dali Mpofu
General Manager WesBank Corporate, Mr Mike Chapman
The Proudly South African Home-grown Awards Judges for 2006
Proudly South African Chief Executive Officer, Ms Manana Moroka
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Today is indeed a day to take a girl-child to work. Girls and children in
general are our proudest asset that we have in this country and I want to thank
them for joining us today.
Thank you also for honouring the great companies that make us proudly South
African.
It pleases me greatly to do so because:
1. Proudly South African is an initiative that encourages us to increase
local content goods that are made in South Africa and increasing jobs in the
South African economy. This ensures that we share the benefits of the growing
economy.
2. It is a partnership actively encouraged by Government as a strategy to
build 'a better life for all,' and it is supported by government, business,
labour and of course the consumers, because it is critical that many people
embrace the campaign.
3. Proudly South Africa helps to move from being a consuming nation to being
a productive nation. This country, more than anything, needs to increase its
manufactured tradable goods that are supplied to the local market and to
increase manufactured tradable exports.
4. Through the Proudly South African campaign we have an opportunity to
create a shared economy in the current growth trajectory, because as we buy
more and more South African goods more and more people will enter the labour
market.
I think we should always remember that there are more and more South
Africans who are able-bodied who will outlive most of us in this room, who are
not likely to get a job until they are 40 years old and that is not good. They
do not have skills; they only have Grade 12 or less.
How can we ensure that in the shortest possible time we position those
people in the market as they are, because we have to focus on growing the
skills? Without addressing that category of South Africans effectively, we can
forget about this democracy and its sustainability.
In our proudly South Africanness, I am urging that we also look at
competitiveness not only at how we can compete globally but also how we can
compete to make our country a safer place. That is the biggest challenge of
competitiveness that has been eluding us, that is why we talk of sharing the
growth and thinking outside the box. It is not about shifting the general
paradigm of how growth develops; it is about how growth develops and creating a
new paradigm of defining what growth is. In being Proudly South African and the
manner that we identify the winners, I am convinced that w are getting closer
and closer in defining success in South Africa in a manner that responds to the
specifics of our country.
We must also consider that the proudly South African campaign is both a
mechanism as well as an opportunity to open our eyes so we can appreciate our
own and position our own brands as South Africa, so that we can also believe in
ourselves. In essence being Proudly South African generally means that you are
able to look beyond only what is good for your company but also what is good
for the country.
I was informed that among many of the things you required from the winners
was the fact that the organisation must have acted in improving the quality of
products, services and operations in the interest of all stakeholders, they
must have contributed to the creation and retention of employment
opportunities, including among others their suppliers and partners. They must
have ensured that the environment was not detrimentally affected by their
products. They must have ensured that there was effective black and women
ownership and participation and that they also contributed to skills and
enterprise development and indeed that they made a difference towards poverty
alleviation.
In South Africa we stretch things, there are not many countries where in the
private sector when you win an award you have to meet these criteria but this
is South Africa, apartheid was harsh so the solutions must be just be as harsh.
We must make these demands upon you and I know that South Africans will rise to
the occasion.
I also want to highlight the fact that in the growth trajectory that we are
in, one of the important factors that are growing is the construction sector. I
also think that it creates a particular opportunity for Proudly South Africa
because there may never be an opportunity like this in our generation. There
are so many opportunities to address the economy in a particular way and to
bring people to the mainstream economy. The same way that we want to bring on
board a broader manufacturing industry into our economy, we need to be able to
link that to those sectors that can consume these manufactured products, and
the construction industry at this point in time and for some few years to come
is going to be in that industry.
I am pleased that I am able to see the manufacturer of the year award as a
new award category because this indeed brings us closer to that. As I said
earlier it is important that we address the issue of being a consuming nation,
not that I have anything against that consumption because the growing black
middle class has contributed significantly towards growth. Most of the shoppers
are buying their first basic necessity goods such at fridges, stoves, beds et
cetera.
We need to take a closer look at the products people are buying, and look at
how much of that is produced and can be produced in South Africa. It pains me
that there is so much of this kind of growth that relates to people who are
setting up homes in South Africa. Again, another opportunity that exists, not
just for us in South Africa but in southern African and in sub-Saharan Africa,
is Infrastructure. We have a large amount that we have to spend on
infrastructure. We have had to do a study because we recognise the capital
goods industry in South Africa is all but gone because we have not been doing a
lot and even in the energy sector we have not built power stations in a long
time, so we lost those industries.
We identified some of the capital goods in a study which you will be hearing
a lot about in the media soon. Just to give you an idea of some of the goods we
identified as causing potential constraints and shooting up the cost of
construction. They include bulldozers, graders, excavators, water cars, bitumen
distributor trucks, scrapers, tractor-loader-backhoe, steel drum loaders
etc.
We believe as the South African government that we must rather acquire these
scarce industries and bring them to South Africa. Furthermore, we must factor
the need to invest in human capital as one of the proudest tasks of all South
Africans in all sectors. Without skills and education we are unable to fulfil
our dream of being the proudest nation.
I thank you.
Issued by: The Presidency
24 May 2007