ADDRESS BY MANGOSUTHU BUTHELEZI, MP
PRESIDENT OF THE INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY

As the Presidency's vote comes the day we celebrate Africa Day, the day on which the Organisation for African Union was created, it is inevitable that we remember the role which the OAU played in the liberation of most African countries and of Southern Africa in particular.

I wish to congratulate the President for the role that he has played in the Continent since the emancipation of South Africa, and for the role that he has played in the development of the new partnership for Africa's development.

As I have often said in response to the President's State of the Nation address, there is a lot that we have achieved in the development of our people in the last eleven years. And yet, while we can rightly be proud of these efforts, there is again the imagery of whether the glass is half full, or half empty.

The reactions we see in different parts of our country reflect the fact that our people can no longer tolerate lack of real delivery in respect of employment, housing, health care and protection against crime and corruption.

Having repeatedly lauded what are our own achievements, I must within the limited time now consider our under-achievements, so that we can concentrate on doing something about our shortcomings.

We must therefore now focus exclusively on these shortcomings because they are killing our nation and are not mitigated by whatever else is achieved in any other field. We have come from a long history of suffering and now face the price and humiliation of self-inflicted injuries. There are tight limits to what a government can do through its actions to improve on the conditions of its citizens. Yet, there seems to be almost no attention given to the damages government's inaction and bad policies can cause to any given nation. Let us therefore look at ourselves as a nation.

No one in South Africa is safe. Anyone I know has been a victim of crime, or lives in terror of becoming one. In all our urban centres and residential areas alike, the state has abdicated from its fundamental duty of protecting lives and property and this function has been assumed by private security companies. The state and the ruling government are perceived as morally bankrupt because of their failure to provide to the most fundamental function of government, which is that of protecting lives and property. While we are playing a plausible role in peace-keeping operations on the continent, our own citizens are not safe. With sufficient resources allocated to it, crime is a problem which can be easily resolved if one has the political will. But there does not seem to be any.

During each response I have made in the State of the Nation address I have repeatedly expressed my concern about the breakdown in our criminal justice system. On the 15th of February this year, in my response to the President's State of the Nation address, I mentioned that I was concerned about the activities of certain individuals in KwaZulu Natal, whom I mentioned.

One of my colleagues in this House, the Honourable Dr Cwele, took exception to my mentioning the name of Sputla Mpungose and his companion. The Honourable Dr Cwele took me to task for tarnishing the image of his fellow ANC members without any justification. And yet, that person, Sputla Mpungose is appearing in Court this very week facing charges ranging from rape to multiple murders.

One allegation involves the shooting of a victim of the rape, her mother and another child who was in the room, ostensibly to prevent the matter proceeding in Court. And yet, this man and his colleague had been hobnobbing with the Minister of Safety and Security in KwaZulu, other members of the Executive Council and very important members of our community. I thank the President for responding to my intervention in this Parliament by writing to me. The President informed me that he has asked the Premier of KwaZulu Natal to appoint a Commission. I thanked the President but pointed out, with due respect, that it did not seem right to delegate the appointment of a Commission to the Premier, since the Province and the Premier do not have the line function of policing.

I also expressed the hope that the Commission should not be a repeat performance of the TRC, as we are concerned about what is going on just now, when people are murdered and nothing happens. No arrests or prosecutions take place. And, to my surprise, even one of the participants in the TRC has been appointed by the Premier as a Commissioner.

Almost half of our population is unemployed or underemployed. As I have predicted from this podium for the past ten years, all ANC's employment generation programmes have not achieved much. Unemployment has in fact risen. There is no worse social evil than unemployment for it is the root cause of all others. Even COSATU has threatened mass action on unemployment.

Yet, the ANC government has stubbornly refused to take the aggressive measures to promote accelerated economic growth, which I, my Party, other parties in this House and many economists have constantly identified. They range from privatisation to maximum flexibility in the labour market and full deregulation of all our market forces to break existing monopolies and cartels. Economic protectionism has failed in this country as in any other which has tried it. I remember as a former member of the President's Cabinet how COSATU and the SACP threatened rolling mass action when Cabinet decided to do something about some of our rigid labour laws. It is some of these laws which are constraining would-be investors from coming here.

I have also proposed concrete initiatives, such as the green revolution, to make South Africa the bread and fruit basket of the world and the development of a long-term strategy to build us an industrial basis enabling our country to bring its own products to the global markets in the decades to come.

I suggested investing in training and in emerging technologies, such as biotechnology, identifying now the products for which South Africa is to be known in twenty years. Yet, not only has none of this been done, but we are blindly failing to acknowledge the bankruptcy of our training efforts, which are costing our country the extraordinary cost of one percent of our national payroll with little results.

Policy failures of this nature should discredit the legitimacy of any government to continue to rule a country like ours. Yet, such failures grow pale before the extraordinary policy disaster of HIV/AIDS and the fight against corruption. Hundreds of thousands of our people have died and continue to die unnecessarily because of bad government policies. I thank the Director-General, Reverend Frank Chikane, for sending me information on what is being done on behalf of the President.

The machinery of government covering the three tiers of government is disintegrating under endemic corruption affecting all its spheres and branches. Let us face up to the harsh reality. We have seen throughout Africa sound administrations built during the colonial period disintegrating after liberation because of corruption and inefficiency.

We thought that this would not happen here because we felt that we are different. However, not just by feeling differently does one prevent evils of this nature. We must act differently and demonstrate zero tolerance for each act of corruption or inefficiency, irrespective of whoever is involved in it. This is not happening at the rate commensurate with the scale of corruption at all levels. This involves members of all parties.

Let us talk frankly to one another. Grand scale looting and personal enrichment are taking place all around us while inefficiency is mounting. Basic functions like answering telephones are not performed in most government offices, or even in our State-owned telephone company or airline, which one may verify when attempting to make a travel reservation or telephone enquiry. Yet, every year the top managers of departments perform the empty ritual of retreating for a week in luxurious seclusion to formulate strategic plans, which either look all the same or remain unfulfilled.

The fiscal picture of our State is sound. The vessel is seaworthy but is unfortunately moving nowhere. We need more than merely balancing our State's books when, as an enterprise, this government of ours has not produced enough and does not deliver. We have seen our people demanding houses which they were promised for the past ten years. Yet, at parity of expenditure, through inefficiency, waste and corruption, this government is delivering less and less houses than ever before. While we all admire the policies of the Minister of Housing, the truth is that we have so far not been able to cope with the demands of our people for housing. It is not just me saying this to score political points as an opposition leader, but what is going on here in the Western Cape concerning housing, at present speaks volumes.

On the one side of the ledger, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, our people are suffering increasingly more. On the other side of the ledger, a small number of people are becoming richer and richer, not through work but through corruption and programmes of fast enrichment. We must correct this imbalance and we would like to see the Presidency focusing more on doing so.