Mbeki
31 December 2006
Fellow South Africans,
Today, the last day of the year 2006, all of us are preparing to celebrate
the advent of the New Year, 2007. On behalf of our government and in my own
name, I would like to wish you all a Happy and Successful New Year.
Unfortunately, there are many of our fellow citizens who will not be with us
as we celebrate the New Year, having passed away during the festive season. I
refer in particular to those who died as a result of the many accidents on our
roads, as well as others who died as a result of various incidents of assault
with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Once again, I would like to appeal to everybody to do everything possible
radically to reduce the incidence of death from unnatural causes. This means
that all of us must pay serious attention to the important messages with which
all of us are familiar - Don't drink and drive! Pedestrians take extra care!
Arrive alive!
It also means that we must not allow that the parties we attend should turn
into battlefields during which we kill the very people with whom we have come
together to celebrate and enjoy ourselves.
All of us must make a serious effort to remind one another that not only is
it illegal to kill another human being, it is also morally wrong. None of us is
entitled unlawfully to deprive any human being of his or her life.
We must also remind one another that the penalty for anybody who kills
another person unlawfully is many years in prison, and that our society as a
whole will always do everything possible to ensure that those guilty of murder
or culpable homicide are caught and prosecuted.
We go into the New Year faced with many tasks that require the minds and the
hands of all our people. Accordingly, we cannot afford to lose any life
needlessly, and thus reduce our capacity as a nation successfully to overcome
the problems with which all of us are familiar.
During the year that begins tomorrow, the year 2007, we must further
intensify our collective effort to deal with these problems, determined to
accelerate our advance towards the achievement of the vitally important
objective of a better life for all our people.
All of us know that we continue to face serious problems of poverty and
unemployment that still afflict many of our people. We know that many of our
people continue to live in shacks, with no access to proper housing. Some of
our people still have no access to clean water, electricity and adequate health
facilities.
We also know that we still have much to do to guarantee proper education for
our children, as well as provide the necessary training for those who need the
skills that our society end economy demand. Similarly, we must continue to
confront the problem of high levels of crime, including violent crimes
committed against the most vulnerable in our society, such as women, children
and the elderly.
Again we know that many of our people live in neighbourhoods that remain
underdeveloped, lacking even such basic infrastructure as roads, making it
difficult for them to engage in activities that would provide them with a
decent livelihood.
Early this year, when we presented the 2006 State of the Nation Address, we
said that we had entered our Age of Hope. We said this because as we approached
our third local government elections and the end of our 12th year of freedom,
it seemed clear that both the public and the private sectors had accumulated
fairly substantial human and material resources, as well as experience, to make
it possible for us to accelerate our advance towards the achievement of the
central objective of a better life for all our people.
We must use these, and all other additional resources, to make the year 2007
a better one than the one we see out tonight, in terms of the improvement of
the quality of life of our people. This time next year, we must be able to say
that we have liberated ever more people from the grip of poverty, joblessness,
homelessness, ignorance, disease and the other social ills we have
mentioned.
We must be able to show practically that we have succeeded to realise the
hopes of even more of our citizens than we managed to do in 2006. I am certain
that as a nation we have both the means and the will to achieve this objective,
making certain that 2007 will indeed be a successful New Year for all of
us.
Tomorrow, our Ambassador at the United Nations (UN) in New York, Dumisani
Khumalo, will take his seat in the chamber of the Security Council, the first
time that our country serves in this important body of the United Nations since
its foundation, 62 years ago.
As we close the year 2006, and speaking in the name of all our people, I am
pleased to wish our Ambassador and his colleagues in our UN Mission success in
their important work focused on the critical challenge of contributing to the
achievement of peace and security in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere in
the world.
Once again, on behalf of our government and in my own name I wish you, dear
fellow South Africans, a Happy and Successful 2007 and a safe passage through
the remaining period of the festive season.
Thank you.
Issued by: The Presidency
31 December 2006
Source: SAPA
