It is a pity that the wasteful habit of staging the annual opening of this Legislature at the Royal Showgrounds continues in 2008. We believe that the formal seat of the Legislature would have been an adequate venue to host His Majesty the King and accommodate all the public gathered here in between all those empty chairs! Hosting the event in the formal seat of the Legislature would also spare the Office of the Premier and allegedly the uMsunduzi Council the expenses they can, by some accounts, hardly afford.  

Before I delve into the Premier's speech, let me first have a word about the Premier. It is widely speculated that yesterday's was Premier Ndebele's last State of the Province Address and, with this in mind, I will be kind. I have known the Premier for many years. I have known him to be an extraordinarily ambitious man with a sense of purpose. He was always determined to become Premier and it is to his credit that he fulfilled this aspiration. 

It is a great pity, however, that the Premier's sense of purpose never extended beyond personal ambition. His lack of substance, always apparent during his time under successive IFP Premiers, eventually set the tone of his own administration. He gave us a government obsessed with self-promotion and self-congratulation and one that always put presentation before content. As Premier, Dr Ndebele was too preoccupied with indulging individual egos in his cabinet, including his own, and with feeding the corruption machine of his own party. Effective and efficient delivery to the people of KwaZulu Natal often came last. 

By way of deflecting criticism, the Premier always had a lot to say about the shortcomings of all previous IFP-led provincial governments, including mine. On every such occasion, he neglected to mention that he was a senior member in each IFP-led provincial cabinet since 1994. If he did not like our policies, he could have resigned. He did not resign and he therefore bears collective responsibility for their decisions. This said, the Premier Ndebele has long forfeited all bragging rights.  

On a related note, the Premier does not give credit where it is due easily. If he did, he would have acknowledged our role in making Nevirapine available to HIV-positive pregnant women in KwaZulu Natal when this initiative, back in 2003, ran against the policy of the national Minister of Health. Similarly, he would have acknowledged that much of his hyped international relations, such as those involving partners from China, Belgium and the Reunion Island, in fact date back to my time as Premier.   

I am willing to bet that my assessment of the Premier as well as his time in office is shared by many in the ANC who remained suspiciously non-committal during the Premier's presentation yesterday. Let us be honest, Mr Speaker. The Premier would not be getting the boot, if his own party felt that he has been a genuinely popular and successful Premier. 

The Premier's Address, we understand, was clearly drafted and delivered with an eye to his own legacy. We in the Official Opposition consider it most peculiar that the Premier would want to be remembered as a fighter against corruption. This is someone who has consistently and recklessly deployed loyal ANC cadres to top posts at key state institutions. This is someone who inculcated in the governing elite a culture of entitlement and elevated greed to be a prerequisite for government service. 

Key policy failures such as the virtual collapse of service delivery capacity in the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs can be traced back to this pattern. In this case, it is clear that individuals were chosen to head Agriculture and I will mention the name of former Head of Department Dr Jabulani Mjwara - on the basis of their political and family connections rather than their management, technical or planning skills.  

In order to make room for cronies and close relatives, the Premier and the MECs have literally purged the civil service of many long-serving and deserving individuals. The Premier famously quipped how only three Heads of Department have been replaced across the provincial government since 2004. We in the Official Opposition promptly fixed the actual figure at 8 HODs, and many other high-ranking civil servants who have been pushed out, in one way or another, to allow some shady characters to take over.  

Mr Speaker, I will not mince words. This government is rotten from head to toe! A microcosm of the plaque is to be found right on our doorstep at Msunduzi. An ANC council split along factional loyalties is now a classic tale that has spilt over from the provincial government into municipalities as a result of selective non-intervention by the MEC for Local Government.  

At Msunduzi, like in other municipalities and provincial government departments, ANC factionalism has created an intricate network where cronyism and nepotism converge in a gigantic web of corrupt relationships. Corruption determines everything from staff appointments to tendering processes. It is eating away at our people's chances for a better future like cancer.  

As a result, a new class of people have come to dominate the government circles in KwaZulu Natal. And they are not shy to flaunt it. A certain Thabani Zulu, former HOD of Social Development and ex-Msunduzi employee, has cost the provincial fiscus quite a fortune. A certain businessman Lucky Moloi who walked away with R1.3-million of uMgungundlovu District Municipality's money attended the opening of this Legislature, sporting a strikingly fashionable outfit. These people are being shielded from police investigation by the party that has just promised to fight corruption. It is the Mjwaras and the Molois - and not the people of KwaZulu Natal - who seem to be the real beneficiaries of the Premier's government.

Mr Speaker, another verbal commitment to good governance and corruption busting, given to us yesterday by the Premier - is simply not enough. If this government truly means to govern with honesty, it must start appointing people to positions in the state based on their abilities rather than their loyalty to the ANC or a particular faction of it.

The Premier's call for a clean-up rings hollow. Last year, a new MEC in tandem with a new HOD was appointed at Agriculture amid much fanfare and commitment to clean up the mess after Dr Mjwara. Less than a year later, earlier this month during a portfolio committee meeting, the new MEC admitted to a complete breakdown in communication within the department.

Similarly, a heated exchange between the new HOD and the department's top management revealed that the latter has consistently failed to report to the former.

These revelations are astonishing in the light of the new MEC's mandate for a turn-around strategy in the department following the forensic report into the past instances of fraud, corruption and mismanagement.

These revelations leave the majority of the Finance and Economic Development Portfolio Committee Resolutions on the 2007/2008 Budget Report hanging in balance and thus compromising the Legislature's capacity for parliamentary oversight.

Even more importantly, the Official Opposition fears the current stalemate in the department will put on hold such pressing concerns as non-existent business plans behind the department's R175.6-million transfer to Ithala, the progress and sustainability reports on Invasive Alien Species programme and Coastal Cashew Nuts and Ntingwe Tea Estates, and outstanding issues relating to Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, to name a few. 

All this effectively proves that it will take a lot more than a change of an HOD or even an MEC to clean up the mess at Agriculture. It will take a lot more than another hollow pledge from the Premier to fight corruption and mismanagement. Mr Speaker, it will take a change in government!

Mr Speaker, the Premier's commitment to economic development is indeed noble. Presumably it falls within the national government's long-term aspiration to manage the economy towards a 6% growth target in order to halve unemployment by 2014. The Premier, we believe, has given scant attention to the phenomenon that can easily pull the plug on all his developmental plans, social and economic alike. As it is, the electrical outages have caught up with us while the economy was growing at barely 5% annually.  

In retrospect, this means that South Africa's target economic growth rate has never been realistically achievable. The government's aspirations, both national and provincial, have simply been wishful thinking. There has never been enough energy to support such an ambitious economic growth. And there certainly is not enough electricity now. 

What is under threat here is not only the projected future growth but also the progress that has been achieved so far in terms of electrification and such practical initiatives as the Free Basic Electricity programme. Much of this progress is about to be wiped out.

Those lucky urban and rural households which have scored electrical connections since 1994 now find there is no electricity to power them.

These are the very things the Premier omitted to mention. These are also the issues, although within national competences, that coincide with the underlying problems of governance in KwaZulu Natal. The reason for the electricity crisis can be put down to inadequate planning from both Eskom and the government, something which can take years to rectify. At Eskom the contributing factors include mismanagement, bad maintenance practices and the loss of skills. After all, South Africa's energy parastatal, much like the provincial government here, has had an alleged reputation of driving affirmative action particularly hard.

Another set of issues the Premier failed to mention concerns the implementation of the legislation the Premier does not seem to favour.

One such law is the KwaZulu Natal Royal Household Trust Act 2007. We in the Official Opposition have been perplexed by the seeming contradiction between the provision of the Act, which presupposes a continued existence of the Department of Royal Household alongside a newly formed Royal Trust and the respective departmental plans to transform the existing department into a statutory trust. The latter is known to be the preference of the Premier and the Official Opposition will see to it that the departmental policy does not depart from the corresponding legislation.

Likewise the Premier, in our opinion, failed to say much about the goings on in his own department. We would particularly like to verify the validity of the allegations of overspending in the Premier's Department which have apparently targeted some capital expenditure for spending on day-to-day running of the department.  

The pending collapse of the boundary between party and state, which has been the primary preoccupation of my Response to the Premier's State of the Province Address, would not be complete without a mention of the pending paralysis of some institutions that offer checks and balances to state power, namely this very House.

The Official Opposition is concerned about the Legislature's apparent failure to honour its Finance and Economic Development Portfolio Committee Resolutions on the 2007/2008 Budget Report pertaining to the Legislature's own administrative issues. The Speaker's ambitious plans, as outlined during a press conference ahead of the opening of the 2008 parliamentary session, pledge further commitment to such controversial initiatives as Taking Parliament to the People.

These initiatives, we believe, are subject to a comprehensive process of independent evaluation and tender scrutiny before they can resume. Also outstanding are the appointment of a multi-party forum to review the editorial policy of the Legislature's publication Iso Elibanzi, and a progress report on In-house Hansard production, to name but two issues the Official Opposition has followed closely in the past. Many of these initiatives are tainted with nepotism and corruption and are clearly not being implemented to facilitate parliamentary proceedings. 

As a result, this House has repeatedly failed to exercise its constitutionally delineated oversight role over the executive and, instead, has become a loyal accomplice to the failures of the executive.

Even on his way out, as it is rumoured, the Premier could not wish for a better ally to help him drive government agenda than this very House!

I thank you.