Address by LN Sisulu, MP, Minister for Human Settlements, during the debate on the President's State of the Nation Address
Mr Speaker
Madam Chairperson of the NCOP
Mr President
Mr Deputy President
Honourable Members
Once again we are treated to doomsday prophets in the opposition. It is almost like there is a formula that they have laid out that the President should follow and deviates from that at his own peril. He should have something about this, he should have said it this way or that way. He should have referred to the National Development Plan (NDP). What they forget is that we, the ANC, came here on a mandate from 62% of the people of this country. When he speaks, he speaks on behalf of that 62% of the voters and indicates what the policies of this government will be going forward. If there was anything the opposition would have wanted to add, they are always given an opportunity to do so and the vacuosness is echoing through this chamber. All emptiness, signifying nothing.
Lest we forget, here is where we come from. The DA argued that they will become the government in Gauteng and in other areas. Instead, they were reduced to second fiddle in some provinces where previously they were the official opposition. They promised that they will marginally improve their national standing to about 30% of the national votes. This pipe dream existed only in their fertile imaginations as they came nowhere near that mark.
Now the madam has found another hired native in the form of Honourable Maimane, who shall forever be grateful to the ANC that has led the struggle today that a black man is a much sought after commodity and handpicked to do what in their world only a black person can do, doing the Madam’s biddings. Sadly, he too will soon disappear. Even during apartheid times the system was not short of collaborators.
Honourable Maimane, we have heard that speech that you gave here, before. Absolutely nothing new in that, except that I learn with regret that you come from Soweto, a revolutionary place and I wonder how you could have come from there. We heard this speech from exiled Lindiwe, with a few tweaks here and there to make it current. What shocked me is when you said that the DA governs better. I can tell you this with all the experience I have had in government, where the DA governs there is more misery for black people; where the DA governs, there is the clearest, starkest inequality between the races; where the DA governs, winter is the darkest period for black people, who would invariably be knee-deep in floods, drenched and frozen in their shacks.
Tomorrow, you go an visit the people of Philippi and especially in Lwandle. See the living conditions, where the DA governs. Ask them how long they have been on the waiting list where the DA governs. What hypocrisy that you say to us that our money could be better spent on the number of issues that you raise. In this province, where the DA governs, R30 billion was spent on consultants, no doubt white cronies of the DA government. In this province, we have scam after scam that is very readily covered up with the complicity of the media. Millions are spent by the City of Cape Town on a scam called the Design Capital.
These millions could have been spent on shelter and proper sanitation. The DA City Council basically paid the Judges for the Design Capital award and will continue to pay these Judges for the next three years. Maybe Honourable Maimane can explain to the taxpayers of Cape Town why the DA bought the title, how much they paid for it, how much it is still costing and how much it will cost over the next three years. And how this can be defined outside the context of corruption and wasteful expenditure.
In this province where the DA governs, the delivery of houses has dropped by 30% in the last five years.
We trounced you at the polls. Honourable Maimane, the “Premier of Gauteng” is now no more than a front bencher, with a lot to learn about Parliament and a lot to learn about being managed. You will also quickly learn not to get too cheeky with the Missus, she runs the show single handedly. Your appeal is no different from Honourable Mazibuko’s – you are black and the DA has been desperate for that. Thank God that your black, hold on to that for as long as possible.
Honourable Malema, welcome to this House, where manners is a very important part of our conduct and where your tongue is governed by the rules of Parliament. It will be a tough place for you. But the reason why you do not remember the President’s speech is because it clearly flew far above your head and your ability to grasp what was said. But hang in there, in a few years you will remember what the President has said. Secondly, you make an allegation that the EFF exists because nature does not allow for a vacuum.
That is not true, it exists because the ANC simply had no place for the likes of you. And that is a fact. The Farlam Commission was set up by the President to investigate the Marikana tragedy. A member of the EFF is participating in the Commission, representing miners, receiving a very fat salary from the State. If you are as radical as you claim you are, maybe he can give that back to the miners. You should not be allowed to make these allegations, it undermines the integrity of the Enquiry. If you have already reached a conclusion, why are you still participating in the Commission.
Honourable Buthelezi, my respect for you prohibits me from responding to you, but you know that you have crossed the line, and you do that all the time. For my sake, personally, please stop embarrassing me and please stop embarrassing yourself.
The President has a Plan and he laid out elements of the Plan. The details of the Plan are the responsibility of each Minister in the coming budget debates. So if there was not enough about cows, Honourable Zokwana will fill in the gaps and should they be suffering from cow disease, Honourable Motsoaledi is sure to solve that problem once and for all.
What the President laid out is a Plan that the Ruling Party and government have been seized with for the last two weeks while some of you were tanning in the sun and the red overalls became handy on Honorable Malema’s farm. We were busy. The depth and detail of the Plan would certainly have been above the average intellectual capacity we have on my left. That is your problem. We are moving South Africa forward. Watch us as we embark on radical changes now that we have consolidated the power of the State and we are set on the next step – that of ensuring our economy is on solid ground.
What seems to be missing in all our analysis coming out of the elections is the fact that, despite all the whining and whinging and scare-mongering is that a total of 62% support in an election in a democratic state is a landslide victory by any measurement. And what everyone overlooks to mention is that this signifies 40% above the second highest vote catcher. Our people have shown their confidence in us once again. We worked very hard for it and we are grateful that our people’s faith in us is solid. So solid that Mamphela Ramphele was reduced from a sought after Damsel to a Damsel in distress, rejected even by her own party, now out in the wilderness, COPE so decimated, leaving poor, once puffed up, Honourable Lekota shriveled, absolutely shriveled! And Honourable Holomisa running and begging miners in Marikana, “hey, remember me? I’m that dictator who freed you from Matanzima, vote for me”. It paid off, because he is back in Parliament, having learned nothing, because he is repeating himself over and over again.
The opposition’s general election strategy was based on innuendo, malignant attacks, rumour mongering and outright slander against the people’s organisation. The same malignant innuendo that is repeated by Honourable Maimane and Honourable Malema. Our people have matured over time and their answer to these nefarious designs was that “Together with the ANC, We Will Move South Africa Forward.” Our people’s hopes are not misplaced in us. Our people’s vital wishes and deep desires sit at the heart of the ANC’s long tradition of resistance. Our people know that:
- Year after year we have built new roads and opened new clinics and new hospitals. While new schools were opened in the Eastern Cape every week, imagine that, we had to fight the closure of schools every week in the Western Cape. And the President confirmed that all school furniture will be delivered to all schools by August 2014, underpinned by proper procurement processes. Eat your heart out Honourable Malema.
- Our people know that year after year we give them houses and now we are moving in to help provide for those in mining towns.
- We connect new houses to electricity.
- We support families who are vulnerable through a basket of social assistance. This government’s grant system has alleviated a great deal of poverty.
- We rolled out anti retrovirals.
- And the list goes on.
We dedicated a great deal of time before the elections telling the good story of what this government has done. As the President indicated yesterday, we spent a great deal of time on the ground to see what has been achieved and what not. We are now responding to our people’s plight, who said, “Mr President, please deal with the economy so that we can secure jobs for our youth as we prosper. Mr President, please deal with local government and its shortcomings.”
Programmes put in place are not empirical, but based on practical experience of all matters at the core of our second phase, transforming our democracy to fulfill a better life for all.
There were several complaints that the President did not mention the NDP. What you don’t understand is that once all of us here adopted the NDP, it became our guiding document. We all lauded it as a very good Plan. The country endorsed it as very good Plan. And to get a whole country to endorse a Plan of the Ruling Party is a significant achievement. We may quibble about how we do things, but the most important thing is that the country has bought into the Plan which we are going to roll out. This is our Plan and this Parliament endorsed it.
We might call ourselves a broad church – as a figure of speech - we are not actually a church, so you will not find the President saying “according to the NDP, Matthew chapter seven, verse eight. But all that he put out here is encapsulated in the NDP. What he did was to unpack in the current context of our priorities, the economy, our apex priorities and how we have restructured the State to intervene decisively to deal with the challenges of service delivery.
And as we sit here, the people of Lwandle are freezing in a hall somewhere, shunned by some communities because of the colour of their skin. Twenty years into democracy, the racial schisms are still etched in the hearts of the people of this province.
Honourable Maimane, the President has indicated that we will intervene to help with the billing system of the City of Johannesburg. We will also intervene to help the Western Cape with its housing delivery and sanitation, having dropped by 30% over the last 5 years, so that we do not see our people running around with unseemly buckets to draw attention to their challenges. Every year when the winter arrives, with it comes the rains and the ensuing floods sweep away the shacks or people are knee deep in water. We will intervene to help the province to eradicate apartheid spatial planning, because quite clearly they are struggling. Please convey that message on our behalf.
Amongst the very good announcements that were made by the President is that we will be intervening to help revive mining towns and take our people out of the abysmal conditions of Marikana. Predictably, this announcement is met with a disappointingly muted response. This is a major breakthrough. Our people cannot continue living in the squalid conditions they live in. It degrades the soul and is plainly unacceptable. The Inter-Ministerial Committee on Service Delivery will get to work on this immediately and we will require the compliance of the Mining Houses with the Social Partnership. We will need the cooperation of the miners themselves and seeing as Honourable Malema has made himself the Messiah of mine workers, we hope he will cooperate with us in this endeavours. It is in the interest of our people.
The President dealt in detail with the problems of service delivery at local government level – that layer of government closest to our people where inexperience, lack of skills, political interference and corrupt practice were identified in our analysis. If we hope to improve the economy, we knew we had to build the necessary capacity in the state to do so. We had the MFPA, but that was not enough. The NDP pointed this out to us and we energetically set about to provide the framework for this in the Public Administration Management Bill that was passed by this House earlier this year. The PAM Bill will allow us to draw skills from the public service and second it to those areas most in need of those skills. Uniform standards were set for all three spheres of government in line with the Constitution and importantly, we banned public servants from doing business with the State, to help reduce incidents of corruption.
I must add at this point, Mr President that I was heartened to read of the comments of Mr Cas Coovadia, acting Chief Executive Officer of Business Unity South Africa’s (Busa) to your speech, when he said:
“the concentration on energy was very important and the focus on local government was also positive. There is certainly room for the private sector and government to work on that because the private sector has capacity it can second ... to bring to bear on the capacity of local government”.
Let all South Africans with a conscience come forward and rally behind our efforts. That is what they can do for their country: to ask “how can we help?” We have the skills. When that happens across all our people, then we will know we have achieved a national identity and a national consciousness that demands of us to give willingly so that we can together move South Africa forward. Because after all, South Africa belongs to all of us and we have a responsibility to ensure it thrives.
I thank you.
