Programme Director, Ms Pregs Govender,
Public Protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela
Members of the Human Rights Commission,
Members of Parliament,
Ladies and gentlemen
The timing of the conference is apposite because as approach the twentieth year of our democracy, it is important that we introspect. By introspecting we need to learn about ourselves; we need to apply what we know; evaluate it against a set of objectives that we have always had for this country, for the quality of life of our citizens and be brutally honest about how we address the tasks at hand. The purpose of such introspection is not mere navel-gazing but to ensure that our people know that their lives are getting better and that we are focused on poverty eradication.
A reminder: when we drafted the National Development Plan (NDP) and released the diagnostic we had set two broad objectives: the first is to eliminate poverty and the second is to reduce inequality. The two are not the same. They are interrelated in many ways and they both need to be addressed. To eliminate poverty in some respects is a bit easier because you can develop a poverty line to the extent that you can get consensus about it and then determine that nobody should live below that line.
Inequality is a bit harder because it is shaped by a number of features. If we look at developing economies elsewhere in the world, we begin to see how inequality takes root. One of the examples in this regard is China which just over 30 years ago was very poor but highly equal and today has a Gini coefficient that is higher than the United States of America. We find that in the process of development, inequality takes root. We need a consciousness about these issues and know that the measures and the skillsets required to deal with inequality will be different to dealing with reality of poverty.
In the struggle for democracy, before we entered Parliament when we took a very specific perspective about what would happen. The attitude that we had can be summed by a line in the Paul Simon song, Boy in the Bubble that goes as follows: ‘These are the days of miracle and wonder’. To some extent the transition in South Africa felt similar to that description of days of miracle and wonder but the truth of what confronts us is that governance is hardly about miracles and wonder. It is an incredibly hard process, frequently an incredibly thankless process but one that we must take on because we understand what our historical responsibilities are. It is hard and thankless because it a challenge to live up to the expectations that have been set.
Part of the expectations are, in fact, entrenched in the quality of leadership that the liberation movement has been privileged to have and that was generated over decades. The dye was cast for many of us when we got into government because all that we had was a consequence of the most remarkable foresight by a generation of leaders who were able to demonstrate this in the way in which they conducted themselves. There is a very strong message in the way in which the issues were communicated. It was very clear that this was not to be an exchange of persons from one hue to another. Part of the message that was communicated consistently was that there was a systemic problem that needed to be addressed and that it was not just about replacing the individuals.
I don’t want to be misunderstood - a while ago, I made the statement that we needed to take responsibility ourselves and we can’t continue to blame apartheid and I was very badly misunderstood. I want to make the point again, that we must take responsibility yet recognise that apartheid and the challenge to remove it from society has been and remains an exceedingly painful process.
We all bear the scars, some physical, some emotional, some psychological of that process. What is important for us is that we were able to hold out a set of messages that was conveyed by a generation of selfless leaders. These were consistent with the ideas in the Freedom Charter and, before, that from the African Claims of 1943. This continuity has found resonance in the constitutional principles for which Oliver Tambo convened a committee comprising mainly of legal minds in the ANC even before the unbanning of the organisation in 1990.
Our Constitution, as demonstrated by the Preamble, embraced these values. The Preamble to the Constitution sets out very specific requirements. It calls on us to heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights. It calls on us to lay the foundations for a democratic and open society where government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is protected by law. It asks of us to improve the quality of life of every citizen and free the potential of each person. It requires of us to build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place in the family of nations.
When we revisit those values in our Constitution, it is important that we understand the context. Frequently, we interpret good governance as doing no harm. Doing no harm is fine but the Preamble to the Constitution does not ask of us to do no harm. It asks of us to actively take steps to do what is required of us. When it asks of us to deal with the reality of improving on the quality of life of every citizen and to free the potential of each person, it is not merely asking us to do no harm. It is asking of us to actively take steps in a particular direction. When we look at the entire Preamble in that manner we have to ask about the process to deal with those commitments.
We all understand transitions, we understand the dialectics of transitions and we know where we have been as a country. We know that the scars of apartheid exist and that there will always be parts of the past that continue but we need some measure to remove it from society. While we know where we come from, it is less clear where we are going to except for those values articulated for us in the Constitution. We need this introspection and we need the measures to understand whether we are progressing or not. Indeed, when shall we have reached the point when we can agree that we made sufficient progress to deal with the injustices of the past? What is that point? What kind of society is this that we describe and how exactly do we deal with this reality. How do we activate society to be conscious and responsible for these kinds of issues?
When the National Planning Commission (NPC) was first convened in May 2010 set about its task by deciding how to proceed. The first few months were difficult. We had access to other long-term plans by countries such as China and India who both released their 12th five-year plans and that of Malaysia who had released their 11th five year plan to assess how far they had come but we did not any history of development plans ourselves. All that we had was the Constitution.
A Constitution that actually goes much further than the constitutions of any other country. For example, we have as our founding provisions a commitment to non-racialism and non-sexism. This, then, formed the starting point for the Commission. The way we set about the task of the National Development Plan by way of the Diagnostic was to first get a sense of the constitutional commitments and then to project directly from there. We then tried to get a sense of how far we had deviated off that path. In the Diagnostic which started the process for us, we identified the two key challenges i.e. the elimination of poverty and the reduction of inequality.
We needed to understand what it was that we saw in society. Of the nine challenges that the Diagnostic identified, we gave pre-eminence to two: the first is that too few South Africans can find employment and second, that the education system provides sub-optimal outcomes for the majority of black learners in this country. The rest of the challenges include issues related to the quality of health services, quality of public services, corruption, spatial planning that excludes the majority of the poor from opportunity, infrastructure maintenance, our dependence on carbon and poor resource management and the challenge of unity that we have not quite addressed adequately.
Out of all of those challenges, I want to highlight the example of education. Education remains the great leveller or not. Education has always been a fundamentally important site of struggle in the period both before and during Bantu education. In terms of the values that have been handed down to us from the previous generation, there was an understanding of what it meant to open the doors of learning and culture and the opportunities that flowed from that. If we look at the performance of the education since 1994 there are a number of positive issues. We have near-universal enrolment in school, certainly up to the age of 16 and, as we will report to the United Nations for the purposes of the Millennium Development Goals, the ratios between male and females are broadly within demographic trends.
Contrary to the apartheid period, it can be stated without fear of contradiction that spending per learner is equal. That change was a significant achievement and if we look at the breakdown of education spending it is comprised of educator salaries that have been equalised regardless of the type of school that the teacher is based at, learner support material that is meant to be equally spent, costs of the department and infrastructure costs which, unfortunately, has remained an on-going issue. Sixty percent of learners are at no-fee schools. Funds are budgeted for a school nutrition programme based on the understanding that children cannot learn on an empty stomach.
In terms of our appreciation of the requirements of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights that deals with education and its history, the financial resources are there. If we look at the legislation, the Schools Act sets the requirement that every school will have a School Governing Body. We find that in urban areas, especially in the leafy suburbs, School Governing Bodies tend to be very effective. However, in townships or in the rural areas, we find that they exist in the exception in spite of the legislation. In many ways, we see this reflected in the results of the Annual National Assessments or the Matric exams depending on the type of school that it is. Where the relationships with the parents are non-existent, it is mirrored in the education outcomes. These issues are reflected in the teaching of mathematics and science at schools.
It becomes apparent that the old divides of the past find resonance in the way that certain subjects are taught. We know that in many primary schools, mathematics is poorly taught and in many high schools learners are actively discouraged from studying mathematics and encouraged instead to do something called mathematical literacy. While the pass rate increases, the young people are ill-equipped to be absorbed into the labour market which will depend on skills and knowledge differently applied.
The question in dealing with good governance and poverty eradication is what kinds of decisions do we take in Parliament? What kinds of legislation do we have? How true are we to the Constitution and how does all of this find resonance in the everyday lives of our people? There is a fundamentally important question about accountability and a second part that we should think of differently related to how we measure certain things in life. I’m not an economist but I am aware that economists will look at numbers and issues like GDP growth and frequently there is a response to measurement that addresses those issues. There is also a different body of learning now about what works and what does not and about measures that we need to apply differently.
I want to quote from a book called, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, written by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen where they compare India and Bangladesh: The comparison between Bangladesh and India is a good place to start. During the last twenty years or so, India has grown much richer than Bangladesh; India’s per capita income, already 60% higher than Bangladesh’s in 1990, was estimated to be about double that of Bangladesh by 2011. However, during the same period, Bangladesh has overtaken India in terms of a wide range of basic social indicators, including life expectancy, child survival, enhanced immunisation rates, reduced fertility rates, and even some (not all) schooling indicators. For instance, life expectancy was more or less the same for both countries in 1990, but was estimated to be four years higher in Bangladesh than in India by 2010 (69 and 65 years respectively). Similarly, child mortality, a tragic indicator, was estimated to be about 20 percent higher in Bangladesh than in India by 1990, but has fallen rapidly in Bangladesh to now being 25 percent lower than in India by 2011. Most social indicators now look better in Bangladesh than in India, despite Bangladesh having less than half of India’s income.
This is interesting because it shows that unless we know what to measure, we don’t know what to look for. It is reflected in the difference between what the Minister of Finance and Parliament does. On Wednesday (23 October 2013) the Minister of Finance will announce the Medium Term Budget Policy Statement and his announcements will be evaluated. Some time in February next year, he will announce the Budget and he will be roundly congratulated for it.
However, when the Auditor-General’s reports emerge at a later stage, the responses are not the same when it is found that the money had not been spent as announced. There is something fundamentally wrong but even within that, the Auditor-General will not measure the types of issues being raised in that comparison between India and Bangladesh. It can merely tell us if the money was properly spent and from time to time, the Auditor-General does a performance audit but even that does not address those issues.
The question of how democracy functions and whether the objectives of our democracy are actually raised in these processes is a question that I hope can be discussed here this afternoon. What we need to be able to do as a country, and these are circular discussions, is that we need to create more employment; to create more employment we need either higher levels of savings or we need to borrow savings from elsewhere in the form of foreign direct investment; in order to attract those in, we need a higher skills base; to have the higher skills base, we need to teach mathematics and science and prepare people differently.
If we don’t have employment, we can’t deal with poverty, nor can we deal with inequality. We tend to lament our high Gini coefficient but the total income earned must be divided amongst those who don’t have an income. The reason why the Brazilian Gini has fallen so much faster is because they create so much more employment for young school leavers than we do. These issues are fundamentally important to the equation of how we will lift people out of poverty. If we don’t fix schooling, we are not going to be able to lift people out of poverty. It is as basic as that.
I want to reiterate that we have a remarkable Constitution. If we asked a group of drafters to develop a Constitution for a country like ours, it is unlikely that we would end up with a different set of rules; not to the Preamble or the Bill of Rights. Many of the pieces of legislation that we have adopted include a number of measures to address poverty. A number of the services provided by government to address poverty are done on a concurrent basis and often the systems between the national and provincial spheres do not correspond resulting in gaps. Some services are delivered at local government level and here systems may be completely out of alignment. It is important that we address poverty in relation to service delivery and the way in which legislation and spending decisions are taken to ask how we can better align the systems.
The National Planning Commission is comprised of a group of people from outside of government who were tasked by the President to take a hard, critical and independent view and to make a series of recommendations. One of the aspects not dealt with adequately in the NDP is that of our institutions including those comprising of public representatives. We have had wake-up calls – we handed the NDP to the President in Parliament on 15 August 2012, twenty four hours before those tragic events of Marikana. What that has done was to allow us to address the issue of poverty by using this incident and the mineworkers lives as a proxy.
The question is beyond the Constitution, beyond the Plan, beyond the legislation; it is about how empowered ordinary citizens in our country are and whether we understood that having reached 27 April 1994, that was only the portal to democracy. We may not have been as crude as President George W Bush who stood on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, on 1 May 2003, off the shore of Iraq and declared "Mission Accomplished".
Democracy is a process, it needs to be built continually and it needs to be measured. It will require a lot more hard work, possibly more than during the struggle against apartheid but we need, at least, the same level of intensity. That level of intensity should draw on our past experiences when we were active citizens taking risks about all manner of things and it this active citizenry that we need to draw on again as a driver of change. Through active citizenry, we need to recognise that strong leadership is fundamentally important as well. Leadership in this case does not refer to the ‘big man’ notion of leadership. It is something that allows for the training of young people and others who are then able to attain skills.
The issue that we have not given nearly enough attention to is the consequences for those who do wrong. We must agree that when there is corruption, we are actually stealing from the poor. The question is what happens if there is tender fraud; are the consequences adequate? What happens when teachers don’t teach, if they are not even in the classroom? What happens if nurses are not healing the sick because they are sleeping during their time in the public health facility so that they can work in the private hospital at night? Who constructs the sense of common purpose?
I have been moved by the story of the two toddlers who were raped and murdered in Diepsloot for a host of reasons including the fact that it seems that five men consorted in this. Besides the horror, the fact that people could come together and not try to stop each other must cause more grief to all of us about how sick our society is. It is about a society that disengages from itself; that manifests itself in a poverty that seems almost intractable in the lives of our people.
We can debate the modelling that was done to develop the National Development Plan but the fuel of it is an active citizenry that recognises what it needs to do, how it needs to respond to circumstances, that would engage with a leadership that would be born of those communities and then links up across the board.
I want to conclude by saying if we want to deal with poverty then we must recognise that democracy is a living organism. Like all living organisms it is a relationship and relationships work best if there is adequate communication but this is something that must be worked at, assessed, revitalised and re-energised. I have a sense that democracy works best when we give it an energy to be able to re-invigorate itself. If we think that democracy is voting once every five years, we would have starved it of energy.
We will not deal with the reality of poverty and inequality. If we set aside the debates about the detail of the National Development Plan, we accept it is never going to be a perfect document, but it does call for active citizenry and it calls on us to energise our democracy. That is the only way that we can be true to the values entrenched in our Constitution and true to the memory of those who led us in the darkest days of that struggle against apartheid.
I thank you.
