of the Province Address
19 February 2009
Honourable speaker
Honourable premier
Members of Executive Committee
Honourable members of the provincial legislature
Departmental officials
Ladies and gentlemen
Let me join other honourable members to welcome the State of the Provincial
Address (SOPA) delivered by the honourable Premier.
The progress we have made in the past five years is a reflection of our
commitment to address poverty and inequality that has visited our people. It is
also an indication that the programme of the second decade of freedom to
strengthen democracy and to accelerate programmes to improve the quality of
life of our people is on course.
Honourable Speaker, it is equally important to sketch the context in which
our social transformation agenda is unfolding. At the point of change of
government in 1994, a lot of compromises have been made and were seen as
necessary to ensure broadest possible legitimacy of the new order and to
advance into a truly united, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous society.
The economy was in the hands of the few, whilst it is a critical factor to
advance social transformation. The legacy of apartheid was glaring amongst the
black majority of our population. Access to social services like quality
education, health services, social grants free of inequalities, access to
electricity, water and sanitation, houses, access to productive land, reflected
huge gaps between white and previously oppressed black communities. The
backlogs of infrastructure in the former homelands are part of that apartheid
legacy and they remain with us to date.
The argument advanced by some honourable members that legacy of apartheid
should not be a scapegoat is incorrect and dangerous. It suggests that at the
point of our take over we should not have affirmed the previously
disadvantaged. The danger with these kind of statements is that we can be
easily made to lose sight of the essence of the National Democratic Revolution
(NDR) which is the liberation of black people in general and Africans in
particular from political, economic and social bondages of the past.
Progress made in addressing socio-economic challenges of the people has
improved the quality of life of our people in the past fifteen years. All these
initiatives have benefited the majority of the poor and improved their
household incomes. The expansion of child support grant to fifteen years and
ultimately to eighteen years, equalisation of old age grants between men and
women is meant to improve household incomes and to address poverty and to
cushion the poor from the impact of global economic downturn.
The expansion of school nutrition programme to higher grades including high
schools in quintile 1 will contribute immensely in the health status of
learners and quality of learning. The extension of no fee school policy to
quintile three schools has pushed the percentage of learners benefiting from
this to more than 60%. Provision of scholar transport has also improved the
access to schooling and education in general.
The improvements in the TB cure rate, lowering of infant and child mortality
and maternal deaths and positive indicators to ensure a healthy nation. The
Comprehensive Care Management and Treatment of Sexual transmitted infection
(STIs) and HIV and AIDS is one of the biggest treatment programmes in the
world. By expansion of Antiretroviral (ART) sites to 74 facilities we have
expanded access to treatment to the poor that was not benefiting. This has a
major contribution in improving life expectancy of our people and ensuring that
we meet our millennium development goals of reducing new infections by 50% by
2014.
The ruling party will continue with the programme that we have put in place
for the second decade of freedom.
Firstly, we have identified education as our priority to improve quality of
teaching and learning, ensuring school functionality, recruitment and
development of educators, improvement of assessment tools and training of Early
Child Development (ECD) Practitioners to improve quality of primary education,
and intensifying poverty combating initiatives like school nutrition programme,
scholar transport, school uniforms and no fee school policy, and development of
infrastructure and provisioning of material to enhance education outcomes.
Secondly, we have prioritised health and will pay particular focus on
national health insurance that will ensure free access to health services for
the poor, the improvement of health infrastructure, and improvement of quality
of service in health institutions; intensification of struggle against HIV and
AIDS and other communicable and non communicable diseases.
As part of the building of sustainable livelihoods, the ruling party will
also focus on the rural development land and agrarian transformation. Whilst on
the one hand, we will continue with provision of social security net for those
vulnerable to poverty, as a developmental state we will focus on rural
development to take our people out of dependency on grants and to ensure self
sufficiency and food security for our people.
Honourable speaker, I am pleased with the current political trends where
political parties seem to be agreeing with the content of the African National
Congress (ANC) manifesto. Their manifesto actually supports our priorities for
the next five years and has not brought anything new. I agree with the ANC
Secretary-General, that this phenomenon is an indication of emergence of
national consensus on the key issues affecting our people. However, I want to
move further and say that this is an indication of the overwhelming support of
ANC policies by all the parties and the people of this country and the
confidence in the leadership of the ANC. I am looking forward to the
overwhelming renewal of the mandate of the ANC on 22 April 2009.
Thank you, Honourable speaker
Issued by: Department of Education, Eastern Cape Provincial Government
19 February 2009
Source: Eastern Cape Provincial Government (http://www.ecprov.gov.za/)
