Programme Director
Minister of Arts and Culture, Mr Paul Mashatile
Minister of Social Development, Ms Mathabile
Co-Chairpersons of the Tshwane Leadership Foundation, Mr Peter Maruping and Ms Rene Risch
Chief Executive of Tshwane Leadership Foundation, Dr Stephan de Beer
The Leader of the Youth Leadership Academy, Ms Zizile Khumalo
Students and young people in the Academy
Sponsors and members of the Private Sector
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
On 4 to 6 August 2011 during the Cabinet Lekgotla, the President of the Republic of South Africa, President JG Zuma, sensitised Cabinet about the plight of the Tshwane Youth Leadership Academy. He advised the Ministers of Sport and Recreation, Arts and Culture and Social Development to design an intervention mechanism in response to the challenges faced by the academy.
We are here today to call on you to use sport and recreation, education and culture as an instrument to overcome your challenges, difficulties and hardships and reinforce positive values in you and your peers. We do this because the nation is expecting you to do more and to do it well. We all say to you, the 2011 Youth Academy class, can and will do us proud through self development and success.
We are encouraged by your activism in sport and recreation by involving yourselves in numerous sporting activities that contributes to your development and self-discipline; and at the same time is able to nurture your talents.
Ladies and gentlemen, South Africans are a respected nation in the field of Sport both in Africa and the world. We want you to emulate that spirit and dedication.
Therefore, this institution plays a pivotal role in sport and recreation in the Gauteng province, especially in Tshwane and contributes meaningfully to grassroots sport development in the Republic of South Africa.
We would want to take this opportunity to congratulate you for showing interest in many sporting codes like soccer, netball, tennis, rugby and indoor games such as chess, pool and table tennis and your enthusiasm which is reflected in the request you made to the President.
Sport and Recreation South Africa (SRSA) would like this Academy to become part of the world class sport and wellness institutes that are developing sport from grassroots level; and taking the lead in sport education, science and technology country wide.
This is motivated by focus displayed by your School of Sport and Play structured programmes that include the needed values like discipline, responsibility, self-confidence, sacrifice and accountability.
Your focus on strategic skills and capacity building programmes in sport that is aimed at integrating both physical infrastructure and expertise is most welcomed. Without doubt, this combination of physical infrastructure and knowledge production can strategically contribute in the roll-out of the SRSA Road Map.
Thus, the Ministry of Sport and Recreation South Africa (SRSA) will explore means to integrate this academy, especially the sport and play component into a pool of sporting and recreation centres that the department supports. This intervention is aimed at confronting the challenges of lack of sporting equipment and facilities and look at how can we assist in your operational budget challenges.
The department will further contribute towards the development of Sport and Recreation capacity building programme in this centre by building capacity for sport activism. This capacity development programme will therefore be a social/community mobilisation initiative for infrastructure development and your active involvement in sport and recreation. We will do this by also donating sporting equipments and other related facilities to the Academy.
As a start-up programme, today, we will donate different sport equipments for netball, soccer, tennis, volley ball, rugby, swimming, cricket, judo, table tennis, chess and pool tables.
Ladies and gentlemen, the obvious absence of sport and recreation facilities in our schools and our communities can no longer be over-emphasised, seventeen years after the 1994 elections; we have to push back the frontiers of infrastructure backlog, especially in rural communities and in townships.
To deal with this huge challenge, our department is engaged with the Departments for Human Settlement and of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs respectively to redirect the Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) to Sport and Recreation to ensure seamless roll-out of schools and community sport and recreation facilities.
Recreation is still an epicenter to cultural identity, community development, social integration, and is a self-esteem generator. We are lifting and escalating recreation to higher levels, and raising the focus on this functional area.
It is therefore the responsibility of all of us to change this. We will succeed to change this by changing the outlook of our schools sport and community. We must make sport and recreation fashionable in our villages and townships. We must integrate physical education in all schools in South Africa and we must make every Wednesday and Saturday a sport day.
With that spirit, we will make life very dull and miserable for those who chose not to participate in sport and recreation. We must make healthy life style and exercise a norm and culture among our young and old.
In this regard, we are motivated by the initiatives such as sport and play programme of the Tshwane Youth Leadership Academy that forms part of your overall agenda for the establishment a sound sport culture in our society.
We are equally impressed by your unwavering recruitment of young people from disadvantaged communities to access and undergo both physical and psychological training and observation in the promotion of balanced sportspersons.
We know that your efforts are constantly undermined by the challenges of the lack of sporting equipments, facilities and support. It is therefore, our patriotic duty and civic obligation to respond to that and utilise important and significant days like this to be with you and share whatever we have with you.
Thus by contributing sports equipment and attire, the SRSA trust that for each of you here, a winning performance in any game you play will be a step towards medal glory on the country’s, Africa and even world sports stage, and that your years of training and preparation will pay off well in future.
Such commitment and dedication will assist our country in its endeavour of nation building, social cohesion and unity and changing the quality of life of all South Africans for the better.
Thank you.
