Honourable Speaker,
Honourable members,
Ladies and gentlemen.
It was a sad day when the community of Kabokweni came together to grieve the loss of their son, Mandla Lekhuleni, by attending his funeral procession. But instead of allowing the community to pay their last respect to the high school student and instead of allowing the community to mourn the death of a young man, the apartheid police fired rubber bullets, pellets, teargas and drove their armoured vehicles into the mourners.
These mourners were not armed. As a result, many were disfigured and a few people even lost their eye sight after being shot in the face. Many were arrested and Ma’m Connie Sibiya, a mourner, a mother, a sister and wife; lost her life on that day.
Honourable Members, Mandla Shabangu and Saul Mkhabela were among the crowd who turned up on 11 March 1986, at the Kabokweni Magistrate’s Court. They went there to support the trialists, but they never made their way home. Instead, they were killed by a government that took away the birth right of black Address by MEC K.C. Mashego-Dlamini people by exiling them to the most arid parts of the country.
They were killed by the apartheid government that spent the taxes it collected from black people to build prisons, instead of building houses. Mandla Lekhuleni, Connie Sibiya, Mandla Shabangu and Saul Mkhabela were killed by an apartheid government that created homelands instead of building roads, bridges, reservoirs and dams in support of rural communities.
Honourable Members, 25 years after the Lowveld Massacre, this democratic government we have made rural development and food security a priority because we realise that for the country to experience inclusive growth, we need to create more professionals who are well vested with the agriculture developmental issues; we need to build the bridges, the roads, the houses, the reservoirs, the dams, the early childhood development centres, the schools and the university. We need to transform rural areas from a dumping place for the young, the sick and the elderly and transform it into a humane place where integrated economic and social growth is possible.
Mandla Lekhuleni, Connie Sibiya, Mandla Shabangu and Saul Mkhabela did not die in vain. All of the people who still suffer daily as a result of the apartheid police brutality are alive in our minds and hearts, because if we dare forget those horrors, we stand the risk of facing those atrocities again. We remember them as we implement the Comprehensive Rural Development Strategy in seven municipalities across the province. Address by MEC K.C. Mashego-Dlamini.
Honourable Members, I therefore move that we remember our fallen heroes, Mandla Lekhuleni, Connie Sibiya, Mandla Shabangu, Saul Mkhabela and many more, as we name the schools, the streets, the parks and the bridges that we will be building as part of the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme.
Ngiyabonga!
