T Mbeki: Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture

29 July 2006

Esteemed Member of the Order of Mapungubwe, Nobel Peace Laureate,
Isithwalandwe, Seaparankwe, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela,
Dr Graca Machel,
Deputy President of our country, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka,
Ministers and Deputy Ministers,
Chairperson of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Professor Jakes Gerwel,
Chairperson of the Organising Committee, Professor Kader Asmal,
Your Excellencies, Members of the Diplomatic Corps,
Distinguished guests,
Comrades, friends,
Fellow South Africans:

I believe I know this as a matter of fact, that the great masses of our
country everyday pray that the new South Africa that is being born will be a
good, a moral, a humane and a caring South Africa which as it matures will
progressively guarantee the happiness of all its citizens.

I say this as I begin this Lecture to warn you about my intentions, which
are about trying to convince you that because of the infancy of our brand new
society, we have the possibility to act in ways that would for the foreseeable
future, infuse the values of Ubuntu into our very being as a people.

But what is it that constitutes Ubuntu beyond the standard and yet correct
rendition Motho ke motho ka motho yo mongoe: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!

The Book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible contains some injunctions that
capture a number of elements of what I believe constitute important features of
the Spirit of Ubuntu, which we should strive to implant in the very bosom of
the new South Africa that is being born, the food of the soul that would
inspire all our people to say that they are proud to be South African!

The Proverbs say:

“Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of
thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbour, Go, and come again, and
tomorrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee.

“Devise not evil against thy neighbour, seeing he dwelleth securely by thee.
Strive not with a man without cause, if he has done thee no harm. Envy thou not
the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.”

The Book of Proverbs assumes that as human beings, we have the human
capacity to do as it says, not to withhold the good from them to whom it is
due, when it is in the power of our hand to do it and not to say NO to our
neighbour, come again, and we will give you something tomorrow, even when we
can give the necessary help today.

It assumes that we can be encouraged not to devise evil against our
neighbours, with whom we otherwise live in harmony. It assumes that we are
capable of responding to the injunction that we should not declare war against
anybody without cause, especially those who have not caused us any harm. It
urges that in our actions, we should not seek to emulate the demeanour of our
oppressors, nor adopt their evil practices.

I am conscious of the fact that to the cynics, all this sounds truly like
the behaviour we would expect and demand of angels. I am also certain that all
of us are convinced that, most unfortunately, we would find it difficult to
find such angels in our country, who would number more than the fingers on two
hands!

It may indeed very well be that, as against coming across those we can
honestly describe as good people, we would find it easier to identify not only
evil-doers, but also those who intentionally set out to do evil. In this
regard, we would not be an exception in terms both of time and space.

To illustrate what I am trying to say, I will take the liberty to quote
words from the world of drama. I know of none of Shakespeare’s Tragedies except
Richard III that begins with an open declaration of villainy by the very
villain of the play.

This well-known play begins with an oration by the Duke of Gloucester who
later becomes King Richard III, in which he unashamedly declares his evil
intentions in these famous words:

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house.
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other”

This open proclamation of evil intent stands in direct opposition to the
directive in the Proverbs which said, “Devise not evil against thy neighbour,
seeing he dwelleth securely by thee. Strive not with a man without cause if he
has done thee no harm.”

Surely, all this tells us the naked truth that the intention to do good,
however noble in its purposes, does not guarantee that such good will be
done.

Nevertheless we must ask ourselves the question whether this reality of the
presence of many Richards III in our midst, dictates that we should accordingly
avoid setting ourselves the goal to do good!

Many years ago, Nelson Mandela made it bold to say that our country needs an
“RDP of the soul”, the Reconstruction and Development if its soul.

He made this call as our country, in the aftermath of our liberation in
1994, was immersed in an effort to understand the elements of the
Reconstruction and Development Programme that had constituted the core of the
Election Manifesto of the ANC in our first democratic elections.

That RDP was eminently about changing the material conditions of the lives
of our people. It made no reference to matters of the soul, except indirectly.
For instance, the RDP document said:

“The RDP integrates economic growth, development, reconstruction and
redistribution into a unified programme. The key to this link is an
infrastructural programme that will provide access to modern and effective
services like electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health,
education and training for all our people. This will lead to an increased
output in all sectors of the economy and by modernising our infrastructure and
human resource development. We will also enhance export capacity. Success in
linking reconstruction and development is essential if we are to achieve peace
and security for all.”

All of these were and remain critically important and eminently correct
objectives that we must continue to pursue. Indeed in every election since
1994, our contending parties have vied for the favours of our people on the
basis of statistics that are about all these things.

All revolutions which by definition, seek to replace one social order with
another are in the end and in essence, concerned with human beings and the
improvement of the human condition. This is also true of our Democratic
Revolution of 1994.

Assuming this assertion to be true, we must also say that human fulfilment
consists of more than “access to modern and effective services like
electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health, education and
training for all our people,” to use the words in the RDP document.

As distinct from other species of the animal world, human beings also have
spiritual needs. It might perhaps be more accurate and less arrogant to say
that these needs are more elevated and have a more defining impact on human
beings than they do on other citizens of the animal world.

Thus do all of us and not merely the religious leaders speak of the
intangible element that is immanent in all human beings - the soul!

Acceptance of this proposition as a fact must necessarily mean that we have
to accept the related assertion that, consequently, all human societies also
have a soul!

To deny this would demand that we argue in a convincing manner and therefore
with all due logical coherence, that the fact that individual human beings
might have a soul does not necessarily mean that the human societies they
combine to constitute will themselves, in consequence also have a soul!

I dare say that this would prove to be an impossible task. Nevertheless, we
must accept that as in the contrast provided by the Proverbs and Richard III
and with regard to the construction of a humane and caring society, we must
accept that this entails a struggle, rather than any self-evident and
inevitable victory of good over evil.

The question must therefore arise for those among us who believe that we
represent the good, what must we do to succeed in our purposes?

Since no human action takes place outside of established objective reality
and since we want to achieve our objectives, necessarily we must strive to
understand the social conditions that would help to determine whether we
succeed or fail.

What I have said relates directly to what needed and needs to be done to
achieve the objective that Nelson Mandela set the nation, to accomplish the RDP
of its soul.

In this regard, I will take the liberty to quote what I said in 1978 in a
Lecture delivered in Canada, reflecting on the formation of South African
society, which was later reproduced in the ANC journal, “Sechaba”, under the
title “The Historical Injustice”.

“The historic compromise of 1910 has therefore this significance that in
granting the vanquished Boer equal political and social status with the British
victor, it imposed on both the duty to defend the status quo against especially
those whom that status quo defined as the dominated. The capitalist class, to
whom everything has a cash value, has never considered moral incentives as very
dependable. As part of the arrangement, it therefore decided that material
incentives must play a prominent part.

“It consequently bought out the whole white population. It offered a price
to the white workers and the Afrikaner farmers in exchange for an undertaking
that they would shed their blood in defence of capital. Both worker and farmer,
like Faustus took the devil's offering and like Faustus, they will have to pay
on the appointed day.

“The workers took the offering in monthly cash grants and reserved jobs. The
farmers took their share by having black labour including, especially prison
labour directed to the farms. They also took it in the form of huge subsidies
and loans to help them maintain a ‘civilised standard of living’.”

Of relevance to our purposes this evening, the critical point conveyed in
these paragraphs is that, within the context of the development of capitalism
in our country, individual acquisition of material wealth, produced through the
oppression and exploitation of the black majority, became the defining social
value in the organisation of white society.

Because the white minority was the dominant social force in our country, it
entrenched in our society as a whole, including among the oppressed, the
deep-seated understanding that personal wealth constituted the only true
measure of individual and social success.

As we achieved our freedom in 1994, this had become the dominant social
value, affecting the entirety of our population. Inevitably, as an established
social norm, this manifested itself even in the democratic state machinery that
had seemingly “seamlessly”, replaced the apartheid state machinery.

I am arguing that the new order born of the victory in 1994, inherited a
well-entrenched value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at
the very centre of the value system of our society as a whole.

In practice this means that, provided this did not threaten overt social
disorder, society assumed a tolerant or permissive attitude towards such crimes
as theft and corruption, especially if these related to public property.

The phenomenon we are describing which we considered as particularly South
African was in fact symptomatic of the capitalist system in all countries. It
had been analysed by all serious commentators on the capitalist political
economy, including such early analysts as Adam Smith.

Specifically in this regard, we are speaking of the observations made by the
political-economists that, since the onset of capitalism in England the values
of the capitalist market, of individual profit maximisation, had tended to
displace the values of human solidarity.

In despair at this development, R. H. Tawney wrote in his famous book,
“Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”:

“To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business
and another for private life, is to open the door to an orgy of
unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. Yet granted that I should love
my neighbour as myself the questions which under modern conditions of
large-scale economic organisation, remain for solutions like who precisely is
my neighbour? And how exactly am I to make my love for him effective in
practice?”

“To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer,
for it had not even realised that they could be put religiously and had not yet
learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral
principles, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of
economic life no moral principles exists.”

In his well-known book, “The Great Transformation”, in a Chapter headed
“Market and Man” Karl Polanyi went on to say:

“To separate labour from other activities of life and to subject it to the
laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to
replace them by a different type of organisation, an atomistic and
individualist one.”

“Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the
principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the
non-contractual organisations of kinship, neighbourhood, profession and creed
were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and
thus restrained his freedom.

“To represent this principle as one of non-interference, as economic
liberals were not to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in
favour of a definite kind of interference namely, such would destroy
non-contractual relations between individuals and prevent the spontaneous
reformation.”

In a foreword to a recent edition of this book, Joseph Stiglitz says,
“Polanyi stresses a particular defect in the self-regulating economy that only
recently has been brought back into discussion. It involves the relationship
between the economy and society, with how economic systems or reforms can
affect how individuals relate to one another. Again, as the importance of
social relations has increasingly become recognised, the vocabulary has
changed. We now talk, for instance, about social capital.”

With reference to this Lecture, the central point made by Polanyi is that
the capitalist market destroys relations of “kinship, neighbourhood,
profession, and creed”, replacing these with the pursuit of personal wealth by
citizens who as he says, have become atomistic and individualistic.

Thus everyday and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons
embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon
each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare. With every passing
second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity – get rich! get
rich! get rich!

And thus has it come about that many of us accept that our common natural
instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin on whose
reverse side are written the words at all costs, get rich!

In these circumstances personal wealth and the public communication of the
message that we are people of wealth, becomes at the same time the means by
which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community,
the very exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa.

This peculiar striving produces the particular result that manifestations of
wealth, defined in specific ways, determine the individuality of each one of us
who seeks to achieve happiness and self-fulfilment, given the liberty that the
revolution of 1994 brought to all of us.

In these circumstances, the meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by
the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the
designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of
our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep and
what we do as part of that company.

In the event that what I have said has come across as a meaningless ramble,
let me state what I have been saying more directly.

It is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value
system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them
personal success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs and the
most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth.

What this means is that many in our society have come to accept that what is
socially correct is not the proverbial expression – “manners maketh the man”
but the notion that each one of us is as excellent a human being as our
demonstrated wealth suggests!

On previous occasions I have cited statements made by the well-known
financier George Soros, which directly confront the crisis to social cohesion
and human solidarity caused by what I have sought to address the elevation of
the profit motive and the personal acquisition of wealth as the principal and
guiding objectives in the construction of modern societies including our
own.

With your permission and because it is relevant to what I am trying to
communicate, I will take the liberty to quote this paragraph once again,
believing that it resonates with a particular sense of honesty, because it
emanates from one of the iconic figures of late 20th century capitalism.
Among other things George Soros said that in an earlier epoch, “People were
guided by a set of moral principles that found expression in behaviour outside
the scope of the market mechanism.

“Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the
criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. People deserve
respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of
exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the
relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have
turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in
principles. Society has lost its anchor.

“The laissez-faire argument against income redistribution invokes the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest…There is something wrong with making
the survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilised
society…Cooperation is as much a part of the (economic) system as competition,
and the slogan ‘survival of the fittest’ distorts this fact.

“I blame the prevailing attitude, which holds that the unhampered pursuit of
self-interest will bring about an eventual international equilibrium in the
world economy.”

All quotations from George Soros: “The Capitalist Threat”. The Atlantic
Monthly, February 1997. The critical concern that George Soros has expressed is
what he describes as ‘market fundamentalism’, the dominance and precedence of
the capitalist motive of private profit maximisation which has evolved into the
central objective that informs the construction of modern human society in all
its elements.

Nothing can come out of this except the destruction of human society,
resulting from the atomisation of society into an agglomeration of individuals
who pursue mutually antagonistic materialist goals.

Necessarily and inevitably, this cannot but negate social cohesion and
mutually beneficial human solidarity and therefore the most fundamental
condition of the existence of all human beings namely, the mutually
interdependent human relationships without which the individual human being
cannot exist.

I am arguing that, whatever the benefit to any individual member of our
nation, including all those present in this hall, we nevertheless share a
fundamental objective to defeat the tendency in our society towards the
deification of personal wealth as the distinguishing feature of the new citizen
of the new South Africa.

With some trepidation, advisedly assuming that there is the allotted
proportion of hardened cynics present here this evening, I will nevertheless
make bold to quote an ancient text which reads, in Old English:

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard consider her ways and be wise: which having no
guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer and gathereth her
food in the harvest.

“How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? When wilt thou arise out of thy
sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to
sleep: so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an
armed man.”

I know that given the level of education of our audience this evening, the
overwhelming majority among us will know that I have extracted the passages I
have quoted from the Book of Proverbs contained in the St James’ edition of the
Holy Bible.

It may be that the scepticism of our age has dulled our collective and
individual sensitivity to the messages of this Book of Faith and all the
messages that it seeks to convey to all of us.

In this regard, I know that I have not served the purposes of this Book
well, by exploiting the possibility it provides, to say to you and everybody
else who might be listening “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways
and be wise.”

Everyday the ant, one of the smallest inhabitants of our common animal
world, goes about her ways in search of sustenance, depending on nature’s
harvest in all seasons, as well as her own little ways, to provide her with
meat in the hot summer months.

To consider her ways means that we too, who unknowingly squash to death the
miniscule pygmies of the world, as we tread the common earth as giants of the
universe, means that we must develop the wisdom that will ensure the survival
and cohesion of human society.

It assumes that we have the humility to understand that “a little folding of
the hands to sleep”, travel and service in the defence of the nation, might
impoverish us by depriving us of our regular meals but simultaneously make us
happy as the man that finds wisdom and the man that gets understanding.

It would be dishonest of me not to assume that what I have cited from the
Book of Proverbs will, at best, evoke literary interest and at worst a minor
theological controversy.

My own view is that the Proverbs raise important issues that bear on what
our nation is trying to do to define the soul of the new South Africa.

I believe they communicate a challenging message about how we should respond
to the situation immanent in our society concerning the adulation of personal
wealth and the attendant tendency to pay little practical regard to what each
one of us might do to assist our neighbour to achieve the goal of a better
life.

I must also accept that many among us might very well think that, like the
proverbial King Canute, I am trying to wish away the waves of
self-aggrandisement that might be characteristic of global human society.

To return to the Holy Bible, the Book of Genesis says, “In the sweat of thy
brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was
thou taken: for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return”. (Genesis
3:19).

This Biblical text suggests that of critical importance to every South
African is consideration of the material conditions of life and therefore the
attendant pursuit of personal wealth. After all, what interpretation should be
attached to the statement that “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat
bread!”

Perhaps strangely, this could be said to coincide exactly with a fundamental
proposition advanced by the founders of Marxism, expressed by Friederich Engels
at the funeral of Karl Marx in the following words:

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx
discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto
concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat,
drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art,
religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means,
and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people
or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions,
the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas on religion, of the people
concerned have been evolved and in the light of which they must, therefore, be
explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”

Putting all this in more dramatic language, Marx had said: “Man must eat
before he can think!” In this regard, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917
Russian Revolution, said: “Before we perceive, we breathe: we cannot exist
without air, food and drink”.

In the context of this Lecture, and what we will say later, we must state
that Marx and Engels represented a particular point of view in the evolution of
the discipline of philosophy and were not asserting any love for the private
accumulation of wealth. They were “materialists”, who were militantly opposed
to another philosophical tendency described as “idealism’.

One of the most famous expressions of this “idealism” was stated by the
French scholar and philosopher, Rene Descartes, who wrote in Latin: "Cogito,
ergo sum." ("I think, therefore I am” and in the original French rendition, "Je
pense, donc je suis".)

In the context of our own challenges, this “idealism” must serve to focus
our attention on issues other than the tasks of the production and distribution
of material wealth.

The philosophers in our ranks will have to engage the old debate of the
relationship between mind and matter expressed in the statements, “Man must eat
before he can think!” and "I think, therefore I am.”

I am certain that our country’s philosopher-theologians will continue to be
interested in these discussions. After all, some of the earliest expression of
“idealism”, as a philosophical expression, is also contained in the Holy
Bible.

In this regard, for instance St John’s Gospel says:
“In the beginning was the Word.”

I am certain that many in this auditorium have been asking themselves the
question why I have referred so insistently on the Christian Holy Scriptures.
Let me explain.

I believe that it is obvious to all of us that economic news and our
economic challenges have come to occupy a central element of our daily diet of
information.

Matters relating to such important issues as unemployment and job creation,
disbursements from the national budget and expenditures on such items of
education, health, welfare and transport, the economic growth rate, the balance
between our imports and exports, the value of the Rand, skills development,
broad based black economic empowerment and the development of the “second
economy”, have all become part of our daily discourse.

Nevertheless the old intellectual debate between “materialists” and
“idealists”, whatever side we take in this regard, must tell us that human life
is about more than the economy and therefore material considerations.

I believe that as a nation we must make a special effort to understand and
act on this because of what I have said already, that personal pursuit of
material gain, as the beginning and end of our life purpose, is already
beginning to corrode our social and national cohesion.

Clearly, what this means is that when we talk of a better life for all,
within the context of a shared sense of national unity and national
reconciliation, we must look beyond the undoubtedly correct economic objectives
our nation has set itself.

In this context I must say that, most unfortunately, there is much trouble
in the world. Much too regularly all of us are exposed daily, to news of
human-made conflict and death and the disasters caused by poverty and natural
disasters.

In reality I must confess that I have hardly ever heard of conflicts caused
merely by low economic growth rates, currency movements and balance of payments
problems, except to the extent that these produce a crisis in society.

Currently, none of us can avoid being extremely concerned about what is
happening in the Middle East. What is happening in this region constitutes a
tinderbox that has the potential to set the whole world aflame. As a country
and people, we surely know that the highly negative events in the Middle East
are of direct and immediate concern to us.

It seems tragically clear that here we are confronted with an impending
catastrophe that is almost out of control. Nothing that has been done and said
during this period of high crisis that has produced the necessary agreement
which would pull humanity back from the brink of an escalating conflict that
can only feed on itself, leading to a further fanning of the terrible fires
that already seem to be burning out of control.

In this regard we must pose the question whether, even in the medium term,
we are not ineluctably progressing towards the situation when the centre cannot
hold. I refer here not only to the serious problems in the Middle East but to
the phenomenon of social conflict everywhere else in the world. As Europe and
the world sowed the seeds for the catastrophe later represented by the Second
World War as in a Greek tragedy, the eminent Irish poet, William Butler Yeats,
like other European thinkers, sounded alarm bells that nobody seemed to
hear.

What he said survives today as outstanding poetry. Hopefully, the warning he
sounded so many decades ago will be heard today, so that, by our acts of
commission and omission, we do not condemn humanity to an age of extreme misery
and death that could have been avoided.

In an appeal to the Muses, when all else seems to be failing, I take this
opportunity humbly to summon from the grave an extraordinary human mind to
inspire the living to focus on the dangers ahead and strive to ensure that
emanating from Jerusalem, the acre of the fountain of many faiths, no monstrous
beast slouches out of Bethlehem to be born!

Thus do I appeal that all of us, the mighty and the lowly, hear the words of
the poet not only with our ears, but also with our minds and our hearts, as he
spoke of “The Second Coming”!

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds
but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I believe that for us to ensure that things do not fall apart, we must in
the first instance, never allow that the market should be the principal
determinant of the nature of our society. We should firmly oppose the “market
fundamentalism” which George Soros has denounced as the force that has led
society to lose its anchor.

Instead, we must place at the centre of our daily activities the pursuit of
the goals of social cohesion and human solidarity. We must therefore, strive to
integrate into the national consciousness the value system contained in the
world outlook described as Ubuntu.

We must therefore constantly ask ourselves the question – what is it in our
country that militates against social cohesion and human solidarity? I believe
that none of us present here tonight would have any difficulty in answering
this question.

I am therefore certain that we would all agree that to achieve the social
cohesion and human solidarity we seek, we must vigorously confront the legacy
of poverty, racism and sexism. At the same time, we must persist in our efforts
to achieve national reconciliation.

Mere reliance on the market would never help us to achieve these outcomes.
Indeed, if we were to rely on the market to produce these results, what would
happen would be the exacerbation of the deep-seated problems of poverty, racism
and sexism and a retreat from the realisation of the objective of national
reconciliation?

Then indeed would we open the door to the demons that W.B. Yeats saw
slouching towards Bethlehem to be born – emerging from the situation where the
centre could not hold, in which mere anarchy would be loosed upon the
world.

We must therefore say that the Biblical injunction is surely correct, that
“Man cannot live by bread alone” and therefore that the mere pursuit of
individual wealth can never satisfy the need immanent in all human beings to
lead lives of happiness.

The conflicts we see today and have seen in many parts of the world should
themselves communicate the daily message to us that the construction of
cohesive human society concerns much more than the attainment of high economic
growth rates, important as this objective is.

As we agonise over the unnecessary killings of innocent people and the
destruction of much needed infrastructure in Iraq and Palestine, in Lebanon and
Israel, we have to ensure that we do not slide into an era when the falcon
cannot hear the falconer, when things fall apart and the centre cannot
hold.

Indeed, as we South Africans, grapple with our own challenges, billions of
the poor and the marginalised across the globe see the world ever evolving into
a more sinister, cold and bitter place: this is the world that is gradually
defined by increasing racism, xenophobia, ethnic animosity, religious
conflicts, and the scourge of terrorism.

In this context, we have seen the rise of rightwing formations, racism,
xenophobia and religious intolerance in France, Germany, Holland, Russia and
many other European countries. This in part, is a reaction to the relentless
development of complex and varied forms that societies are ineluctably assuming
due to the processes of globalisation.

It nevertheless also points to the absence of an integrative thrust some
reconciler the institutionalised processes that would end the sense of
alienation and marginalisation that leads to social conflict.

Indeed even in these developed societies, rising levels of poverty and
insecurity have invariably conspired to fertilise the ground from which
germinates ignorance about the other and portend a bleak future for the
prospect of what has been called a dialogue among civilisations.

In many European countries, immigration from the South is seen as an
intrusive force that is bound to create impurities in local cultures and in
many instances, put a burden on available resources. In this regard, I am
certain that all of us have been dismayed to see the way in which many in
Europe have responded to the African economic migrants, who daily risk their
lives to escape the grinding poverty in our own African countries.

Fortunately, in our case I would say that our nation has begun to exhibit
many critical common features deriving from a unified vision of a society based
on non-racialism, non-sexism, shared prosperity and peace and stability. Yet,
at the same time, we still display strong traits of our divided past with the
debate about our future quite often coalescing along definite racial lines.

Despite this and despite the advances we have made in our 12 years of
freedom, we must also recognise the reality that we still have a long way to go
before we can say we have eradicated the embedded impulses that militate
against social cohesion, human solidarity and national reconciliation.

We should never allow ourselves the dangerous luxury of complacency,
believing that we are immune to the conflicts that we see and have seen in so
many parts of the world.

At the very same time as a ray of hope shone over our country and continent
with the liberation of our country in 1994, and as you, Madiba, declared to the
world that “the sun shall never set on so glorious a day”, our fellow Africans,
the Rwandese people, engulfed in a horrific genocide, lamented in unison that:
‘the angels have left us’.

In a foreword to the book of the same name, Archbishop Tutu said: “When we
come face to face with ghastly atrocities we are appalled and want to ask: ‘But
what happened to these people that they have acted in this manner? What
happened to their humanity that they should become inhumane?’

“Yes we hang our heads in shame as we witness our extraordinary capacity to
be vicious, cruel and almost devoid of humanness.”

The imperative we face is that we should never permit that our country
should witness the actions devoid of humanness of which Archbishop Tutu spoke
some of which were a feature of our long years of colonialism and
apartheid.

Indeed, in a world that still suffers from the blight of intolerance, wars,
antagonistic conflicts, racism, tribalism and marginalisation, national
reconciliation and reconciliation among the nations, will remain a challenge
that must occupy the entire human race continuously.

In our case we should say that we are fortunate that we had a Nelson Mandela
who made bold to give us the task to attend to the “RDP of the soul”, and lent
his considerable weight to the achievement of the goal of national
reconciliation and the achievement of the goal of a better life for all our
people.

Ten years ago, Madiba travelled to the Republic of Congo to assist the
people of the then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo, to make
peace among them. In this regard, he was conscious of the task we share as
Africans to end the conflicts on our Continent, many of which are driven by the
failure to affect the RDP of the African soul, to uphold the principles of
Ubuntu, consciously to strive for social cohesion, human solidarity and
national reconciliation.

Tomorrow the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will go to the
polls to elect their President and Members of the National Assembly. Everything
points to the happy outcome that these democratic elections, the first in more
that 40 years, will produce a result that truly reflects the will of the people
of the DRC.

We must therefore say that we have arrived at a proud moment of hope for the
DRC and Africa and wish the sister people of the DRC unqualified success.

Yes, the Middle East is engulfed in flames that are devouring many people in
this region and cause enormous pain to ourselves as well. But this we can also
say, difficult as it may be for some fully to accept, what the people of the
DRC have done and will do, is also helping to define a world of hope, radically
different from the universe of despair which seems to imprison the sister
peoples of the Middle East.

I can think of no better birthday present for Madiba than tomorrow’s
elections in the DRC and no better tribute to the initiative he took 10 years
ago to plead with the leaders of the Congolese people that together as
Africans, we must build a society based on the noble precept that - Motho ke
motho ka motho yo mongoe: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!

Once again, happy birthday Madiba!

Thank you.

Issued by: The Presidency
29 July 2006