National Assembly:   10th September 2009

Honourable Speaker,

Olivier Bernier wrote in "Words of fire deeds of Blood": "The French Revolution, in less than four years, changed the World. From the moment Louis XVI walked up the steps of the guillotine, no other European Monarch felt safe again... (France gave itself a Constitution 

and a Legislature). The liberties the French claimed for themselves - of religion, of the press, of assembly of thought; the right to be taxed only if their representatives had first consented; equality before the law and the end of privileges - all these startling innovations soon appeared to be the normal requirements without which no state could claim legitimacy."

Centuries on, the long and tortuous struggle waged by Black people in South Africa against colonial exploitation and the legendary oppressive apartheid rule  culminated in the victorious constitutional and Parliamentary democracy inclusive of all the people of South Africa. South Africans, like the French, attained for themselves substantive rights and freedoms without which the apartheid state failed to claim legitimacy.

Ideally, the vision of the newly found democratic legislature from 1994 was to build an effective Peoples' Parliament responsive to the needs of all the people, driven by the ideal of realizing a better quality of life for all the people of South Africa.

A decade and a half later in 2009, the call by President Jacob Zuma and subsequently by the Speaker of the National Assembly the Hon. M. Sisulu for the emergence of the activist Parliament and State demands of this fourth Parliament a new paradigm, an active review of the manner in which the legislatures respond to the needs of the people, in particular those of the majority of South Africans who continue to toil under the yoke of grinding poverty, systematic social and economic deprivation, racism, intolerance and underdevelopment.

The new paradigm should mean that the sovereignty of Parliament and state, the actions of the executive should reflect the activities and liberties of all citizens. The Hon. Ben Turok asserted elsewhere that the programmes of the executive should be driven by the people themselves in order to attain optimum social and economic development. 

A long-standing maxim by development theorists and practitioners.

We believe this state of affairs would be partly experienced where the executive did not view the legislature as the adversary, where it did not feel it had to defend the fallibility inherent in the state before Parliament. The Hon. TM Masutha affirmed recently, and rightly so, that the executive should be regarded as the integral part of the Parliamentary oversight mechanism.

Activism on the part of the legislature and the executive will require loyal adherence to the principles of egalitarianism, seek to promote participatory planning and project implementation to remove inequitable socio-economic conditions. The manner in which we have pursued service delivery so far has been lacking in this egalitarian concern, and thus threatened to turn the current process of service delivery into a tool for perpetual dependency, underdevelopment and permanent civil unrest. Fortunately, the Green Papers on National Strategic Planning and Improving Government Performance by the Ministers in the Presidency, envisioned the incorporation of the dreams of South Africans about the future they want to have. The short and long term strategic plan, goals and objectives will be interwoven in the social, economic, political, moral, religious and cultural aspirations and primacy of the citizens.

Rousseau maintained that "the State could serve as an instrument of freedom only when all its subjects were at the same time sovereign, for then alone could the people be truly said to rule themselves."

We have, for fifteen years in this Assembly, deliberated and legislated with the firm belief, and fired by political party manifestos and elections that the contract existed between Parliament and the People and between the State and its citizens. Factually, we have acknowledged, in part only, the obligations placed on Parliament and State by this contract. We have unwillingly neglected the fact that there should be equality of partnership in the contract, include the people as co-decision makers, co-planners, co-implementers, co-monitors and co-evaluators of the laws and projects that are meant to change their lives for the better. Unless the legislatures and the executive adopt participatory planning as the necessary process in the government's development agenda, the country will find it difficult to shake off the rampage of the civil protests that have now gone beyond the realm of peaceful expression of discontent, and have become appallingly violent and destructive.

The success of a developmental State which the government is now pursuing with much vigour will depend largely on the kind of activism that places greater emphasis on the component of human development, and reserves direct State intervention for public safety, redress of the imbalances of the past, welfare programmes and protective security. 

Equally, distributive economic justice will require from the Legislatures and the executive the kind of activism that will promote strongly participatory economic development, where the economic potentials of the majority are unlocked and economic self-management is enhanced.

Perhaps what we are trying to say to parliament and the executive is that let us refrain from perceiving the poor and marginalized majority of our people as passive and helpless recipients of social services, but as potential owners, controllers and managers of South Africa's economic resources and wealth.

How else could we translate into reality what Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said in Davos early this year when responding to the global economic slump, that it was an opportunity for the nations of the world to think of a new world economic order and rectify the negative implications of uneven international economic inter-dependence, while President Jacob Zuma said the slump presented good opportunities for South Africa to really look at its own economic development? 
 

Precisely, what does an activist Parliament and state mean to us in the House and the rest of the country?

I thank you.