Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Free State, Professor Jansen
The academic staff of the University of the Free State
Premier Ace Magashule and Members of your Executive Council (MECs)
Executive mayors, mayors and members of the provincial legislature (MPLs)
Members of the non-state actor community
Students of the University of the Free State
Senior management and staff of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation
Ladies and gentlemen
On behalf of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, I wish to start by thanking the council and top management of the University of the Free State for allowing us to be their guests, as we go around the country rolling out our Public Participation programme. We truly appreciate the gesture, especially in view of the fact that our being here coincides with the Easter vacations and therefore a period of recess for the university.
In the same breath, please allow me to also thank the Premier of the province, Comrade Ace Magashule and members of the provincial executive council for their presence and support. Without reservation, let me also thank the Speaker of the legislature and all MPLs present here, including senior managers in government.
My presence here today, vice-chancellor, is also timely for our department because we are currently on a country wide road show to popularise our foreign policy and interact with our various stakeholders and role players on what our country is trying to achieve beyond its borders.
We were at the University of Limpopo and subsequently Rhodes University during the month of October last year, where we spoke to the students, academic staff, business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) about the preoccupations of our foreign policy, its successes and its challenges.
Our interaction with you this morning seeks to revisit and demystify the mistaken notion that foreign policy is a distant, luxurious preoccupation of elites based somewhere in Pretoria and New York and Beijing and Addis Ababa, with no significant bearing on the lives of ordinary people.
We are here to answer to the sceptics who wonder whether our country’s engagement with the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union or even the United Nations is not just a waste of time and that of our precious resources. Some will ask: can’t we just close our borders, insulate ourselves and enjoy our wine, our gold and diamonds, our soccer and rugby and cricket, our seas, our natural flora and fauna? The answer is no, because the age of “globalisation” is upon us, let alone afford to be an “island of prosperity in a sea of poverty”.
These are the same people who, correctly so maybe, do not see why we should be concerned and engaged in issues that relate to Sudan or Somalia or the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe or Madagascar. To complicate matters more, they see and hear us in the corridors of the United Nations or in Copenhagen at the Climate Change conference or alongside our Indian and Brazilian counterparts. To confuse them even more, they see no connection between the struggles they endure daily and our travels to far away shores.
It therefore gives me great pleasure, vice chancellor, to be here this morning to share with you my thoughts on “South African Foreign Policy Focus Today and in the Future”. We hope, through this lecture, that we will contribute to a better understanding of our foreign policy and its relevance to our domestic concerns.
It is my hope that this lecture will also provide the necessary motivation and clarification that without peace in our Continent there shall be no development, and that without development there shall be no peace.
Vice-chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, our journey around all the nine provinces of the country is premised on the understanding that the practice of foreign policy is a contested terrain, no more a unique preserve of diplomats representing governments.
Through our own assessment within the Department, we arrived at the simple conclusion that our fellow South Africans do not know our department or what it does, what our foreign policy is all about, what it seeks to achieve, what are the challenges, what are the non-negotiables, and of course how it can contribute to the building of a just, peaceful and prosperous South Africa, Africa and the world.
The Public Participation programme that we have designed seeks, amongst others, to ensure that the preoccupations of our foreign policy are known and appreciated and the mandate of our department understood. Furthermore that that ordinary South African can link the country’s domestic priorities and our department’s international engagements.
Last but not least, the programme seeks to create mutually beneficial engagements between our department and a host of non-state actors like this university community.
Issued by: Department of International Relations and Cooperation
30 March 2010
