Madam Speaker:

We are conducting this debate against the backdrop of an election which has redefined roles and responsibilities. All political parties campaigned primarily on the five substantive issues of unemployment, crime, HIV/Aids, poverty and corruption. The ANC received an overwhelming mandate to deal with and redress these issues. We are not contesting or challenging this mandate because, as a democrat, I fully respect the will of the South African people. It is now my responsibility and that of my Party to provide our contribution to ensure that the mandate of the South African people will be respected and fulfilled. The South African people do not deserve another season of empty promises. In his address the President has shifted emphasis from planning to implementation. We must turn a leaf to ensure that integrity, accountability and honesty now enters the realm of politics and changes the way our country is governed. For this reason both I and my Party have committed ourselves to providing our people with a democracy which holds the benefits of a much needed moral opposition.

Our moral opposition will be constructive. We shall applaud when praise is due and we shall voice the moral indignation and anger of the South African people when their mandate is being ignored. Our moral opposition will reflect the way I have always acted in the past fifty years of service in politics. We will focus on shortcomings in policies, programmes and legislation and will deal with issues, not with people, without personalising matters. We feel that it is the role of a moral opposition to bridge the divisions which have been generated within this House because of lack of respect. The ruling Party must learn to listen to the merits of what is being said without rejecting good proposals because they may not like the messengers.

We are emerging from an election which strengthens the ruling party and weakens our democracy. We have spent six years negotiating a constitutional framework for our Country, which is now almost meaningless from a political viewpoint as the Constitution is liable to be changed as the ANC pleases. Unfortunately, the crossing of the floor legislation has shown the willingness of the ANC to tamper with our Constitution, not only at will but even at whim. We are emerging from an election which has concentrated 100% of the political power in the hands of a few people, who may end up acting as a small and self-serving elite. Under these conditions the responsibility of a moral opposition is that of providing the last sets of checks and balances, without which our democracy is in great peril. We need to keep at bay the ever-present forces and pitfalls lurking in the shadow of a one-party State. In our nation's interest the ruling party is to be held accountable to ensure that our people's expectations are met. In his address the President mentioned important programmes, such as those relating to black empowerment. These programmes will extend the power of the ruling elite into wider segments of our economy and social and cultural life. It will be our role to voice the expectations of the South African people that these programmes will indeed be about the empowerment of the many, rather than the enrichment of the few.

Now, more than ever, our democracy needs checks and balances. I feel that both I and my Party are now truly free, free at last to provide the full measure of our constructive, moral opposition to ensure that our democracy may survive in a context in which 100% of the power is so highly concentrated in the hands of a few people. We need to ensure that our democracy begins to recognise the need of separating the Party from the State. The State cannot belong to the ANC, but only to the South African people, and the ruling Party ought not to use the State as if it were an extension of its political machinery, and for its own political purposes. We must strengthen the role of Parliament and its centrality to ensure that it is not regarded by the Executive as a tool on demand, which carries out the wills and dictates of the centre. Democracy is vested in this Parliament, not in the corridors of Tuynhuis or the Union Building.

We in this Parliament have the responsibility of making laws and developing public policy. The Executive should limit its role to implementing what has been thought, formulated and decided here. Unfortunately, we all know that in the past ten years the overwhelming majority of what has been legislated was in fact thought and formulated outside of this Parliament, whether it was from within departments of State, or within the policy backrooms of the ruling Party. The next five years must give rise to the supremacy of Parliament and our collegial responsibility of fulfilling the mandate we receive from the people. This Parliament must express the conscience of South Africa. We, as the moral opposition, shall voice the bad conscience of the ANC in respect of matters in which it is not living up to the promises it made. Together we must react whenever the Executive falls prey to paralyzing denial, whether it is denial about corruption, or denial about HIV/Aids, or denial about Zimbabwe. In these chambers there cannot be space for any more of this syndrome of denial. With all of you, I wish to champion the centrality and supremacy of this Parliament. Too much has not been attended to in spite of many promises, and our reaction cannot be that of denial, but ought to be that of caring self-criticism.

We must recognise the dramatic nature of the problems confronting us and against it assess the adequacy of the measure proposed by the President. In his address the President made proposals that are good, but the issue is whether they are indeed good enough. Unemployment is now at 42% of our population and rising. The expansion of the public works programmes is not a sufficiently vast and sustainable response to such a dramatic problem. We still do not have a comprehensive strategy to accelerate our rate of economic growth, provide South Africa with an industrial basis, and enable our Country to have a long-term successful and profitable presence with its products and services in the global markets. As we contested the elections, my Party, as well as other parties, formulated viable proposals to accelerate economic growth and unleash the hidden potentials in our economy by liberalising market forces. It is essential that the ruling Party has the humility of recognising that might is not necessarily right and that those in the moral opposition may indeed have a contribution to make to the general good, by means of better ideas and strategies to generate employment through economic growth, rather than placebo measures such as the expansion of the public works programme.

Similarly, I am deeply saddened that the President's address seems to ignore the dramatic nature of the HIV/Aids pandemic, which would have required more than a passing mention in the strategy of Government. HIV/Aids cannot be a priority amongst many. It must be one of the first priorities because our nation is dying while its rulers ignore it with complacent denial. Across the board, I feel that we are far from having created the parameters of a truly caring society. The lack of sufficient recognition and care for those who are infected or affected by HIV/Aids is the tip of an iceberg. Poverty remains our country's major unattended problem. A country like ours has the resources to ensure that all our children go to bed every night with food in their stomach, and yet the malnutrition of our children and their daily hunger have become an occurrence to which, with complacent denial, most of our leaders have grown accustomed to. As a moral opposition we are committed to voicing the anguish of those who are ignored, because our society shall never become one in which those who have become rich and powerful, or merely achieved a level of comfort, become oblivious and insensitive to the plight of our compatriots. A moral opposition must be a patriotic opposition which recognises that this country of ours must provide to all South Africans. We cannot allow that the politics of race be replaced with the politics of class in a context in which those at the top, remain in the future as insensitive to the plight of those at the bottom, as they were in the past.

We must care and we must be able to transform our caring into action. To this end it is necessary to strengthen delivery capacity of the State. Policy and statements which do not translate in tangible delivery are a further insult to the plight of the poor. I am concerned about the President's address underpinning a centralistic logic of delivery, which is at odds with the decentralised structure of our State. One cannot make commitments from the centre to delivering houses when the matter is handled by provinces. This constant centralising and centralised perspective will remain a major impairment in actual delivery. If we are to bridge the gap between policy and implementation we must recognise that in our Country, in our system of government and in our reality, implementation and delivery are the responsibility of provincial and local government. We will provide our contribution to make the ruling party realise that the role of the central government should be that of enabling provincial and local government, providing them with the required autonomy and capacity. We are still dealing with a highly inefficient State apparatus, which is made worse by the unwillingness of the ruling Party to reform it on the basis of devolution of powers, decentralisation and autonomy, so as to redress the State's weak delivery capacity. We remain committed to the practice and philosophy of local empowerment because we can no longer afford for the State to remain part of the problem rather than part of the solution in respect of delivery.

We must become more sensitive to bread and butter issues. We cannot rest while people are still without electricity, access to running water or tarred roads. A lot was done by the past Government in which I participated, and more must be done by this Government, as the President has announced in his address. We must break the cycle of poverty and ignorance by fighting adult illiteracy. Our role will be that or reminding that if we are to drive progress, the chain with which we do so is only as strong as its weakest link which lies in the neglected masses of South Africans. We will continue to support the Government to increase delivery of services and in this respect have no intention to be destructive, even when voicing our criticism. We compliment the President for having began attaching time frames to certain aspects of service delivery, shifting emphasis onto implementation and away from promises which hang in the air.

I have noted the passing remarks made by the President relating to traditional leadership. In many other respects the address of the President reflects statements he made one year ago and the previous year and the year before it. Many of the promises have been repeated and some have been increased. However, in respect of traditional leadership we have now reached what seems a policy of wooing without even promises being made, as this year less has been promised for traditional leadership than in any of the past years when much was promised and little or nothing delivered. I feel that our Country has yet to develop a real policy about traditional leadership and offer traditional leaders a fair and just accommodation in the new democratic dispensation. I will continue to voice the aspiration of traditional leadership, not because we wish to protect the interest of a few leaders but because, on the strength of more than half a century of experience, I know that traditional leadership has a fundamental role to play in the renewal of our society and the development of our communities. It would be idle to talk of an African renaissance without the contribution of traditional leaders, as they are the custodian of traditional values.

Our country has great opportunities. The next five years will be remembered as the time in which these opportunities have been seized or forever missed. We pledge our role and commitment to ensuring that the Government of South Africa becomes an instrument to these opportunities being seized before they are lost. Both I and my Party remain long-term runners. We feel that our role in the service of our democracy is now more important than ever. Like our society, democracy too is also a chain as strong as its weakest link. It is the role of a moral opposition, and the role I will play in this Parliament to ensure the strength of the weakest links of our democracy. I hope that as I respect the role of the ruling Party and the mandate that it received from the South African people, the ruling party will learn to respect my role and the role of the opposition. We need to learn to look upon an opponent not as an enemy and to become more respectful of one another. I often find the proceedings in this Parliament to be appalling, both because of the jeering and heckling which takes place here and because of the unwillingness to listen and learn from what has been said here. If we are serious about providing the full measure of our contribution as Members of Parliament, and if this Parliament is to become more than a clapping crowd, obsequiously applauding the work and policy of the Executive, we must rise to the challenge of becoming more professional in our debates and more respectful of whatever is said here, irrespective of who says it. I hope that also in this respect the next five years will be better than the past five years.