It gives me great pleasure to be with you on this occasion to rekindle a long lasting dialogue which over decades I have enjoyed with the Rotary Club. I have spoken at Rotary Club events not only in South Africa but throughout the world and indeed some of my first contacts with the Rotary Club during apartheid were in foreign countries. I have spoken at events of the Rotary Club in various capacities. Today, what prompts me to address you at this meeting is my capacity as the patron of the National South African Workers Welfare. I was the founder of the first institute for black workers in DURBAN when black workers were at the time barred from being members of any Trade Union. Because of my involvement with black workers in the 70s and 80s I was honoured by the largest Trade Union in the World - THE AFL-CIO of the United States. They awarded me the George Meany Human Rights Award. This was jointly awarded to me and to a great South African Trade Unionist - Dr Neil Aggett who died under very suspicious circumstances. We were the second joint recipients of this Award with the late Dr Aggett after it was first awarded to Mr Lech Walesa of SOLIDARITY in Poland. It is therefore a great honour for me to be patron of this umbrella Trade Union which through the LIBERAL TRADE UNION in Belgium brings to South Africa the expertise and assistance of this great European Trade Union and their Government.

I enjoyed the pleasure of being the patron, the founder or the president of various NGO's or foundations ranging from the environmental field to the charitable and religious ones. I even have the pleasure of being made an honorary CHEF by the Chef's Association. Yet, of late, I have spent much of my time and energy with this specific NGO because I feel that its presence in South Africa carries a message of much greater importance and which, in fact, goes beyond its own activities. It is a timely message of incipient and necessary economic union between the European and the African blocs. This perspective is becoming increasing more compelling, not only for me but also for many influential friends that I have in the whole of Africa as well as in Europe and in the United States.

Something compelling in our season of history demands that the African Union and the European Union grow closer together not only to compete with the challenges of the twenty first century but also to achieve the very respective purpose for which they were conceived and brought into existence. Therefore, from this broader and somehow visionary perspective I will take the liberty of tackling tonight the otherwise often traversed theme assigned to me, which is that of the challenges now confronting the African Union.

The African Union is a necessity which had to happen and we are all endorsing its coming into existence. We are all supportive of the political vision which underpinned the transformation of the Organization for the African Union [OAU} into the actual African Union. As you all know this political and ideological perspective and vision was embodied in NEPAD, the New Partnership for the African Development, which so much owes its genesis to the initiative, perseverance and vision of our own president, the Honourable, Thabo Mbeki. However, the problem with NEPAD remains in its limitations, as it is fundamentally a political and aspiration-based document rather than one which sets in place structures, agreements and economic realities which by themselves can create a union of any type out of the many still separate and diversified African states, realities, nations and peoples.

There is a sharp distinction between the path of integration followed by the European Union in the past half a century and that which has now been commenced by the African Union. In the European path of integration, structures with real power came first and then the political process followed. Actually in Europe the great attention was given to avoiding giving political value to the process of integration, almost as if it were happening exclusively at an economic level. Its main trust was that of avoiding that ever again Europe could fall into the devastating wars which juxtaposed its countries for the prior three hundred and fifty years and which in the first half of the twentieth century drew the entire world into two catastrophic global conflicts.

It was soon realized that conflicts within Europe would become unlikely if not impossible if no nation-state could control that which is required for the making of guns, namely coal and steel. Hence, for the first time in history, Europe has brought about an extraordinary institution, namely a "super-national" limited sovereign entity, which has sovereign powers of which the member states were correspondingly deprived in respect of a limited score of matters dealing with coal and steel. This approach was then extended in respect of the next potential threat to peace represented by atomic energy, and hence the European Communities for Coal, Steel and Atomic Power came about in 1952. Five years later this approach, based on economic rather than political integration became so compelling that in 1957 the Treaty of Rome extended it to the full range of economic matters by establishing the European Economic Community which brought about the free circulation of people, capital and labour.

Since then, the following obvious step of this process, that dealing with political integration was constantly discussed but never taken. It is for history, not for me, to apportion the blame to those who delayed the cause of political integration, but it was not until 1993 that the Treaty of Maastricht placed political integration straight on the agenda and declared that the European Union shall be formed. The actual coming into existence of the European Union as a real and self standing political entity is far from being completed and has received a major setback from difficulties the Europeans have met in reaching consensus on a common European constitution.

In Africa we started from the other end, and no one is to say whether because of it, we are going to be more or less successful than the Europeans in achieving the same intended goal. In our first continental step toward integration, we brought about a process of political rather than economic integration. To a certain extent bringing about political rather than economic integration was simpler because consensus was reached on non-painful and somehow preliminary measures. No power was taken away from any state. No entity was created which could establish preeminence over national governments or dictate anything to them. We have nothing similar to the European Commission and other European institutions which, with ever growing powers, have been producing law binding all over Europe and their respective governments for the past half a century.

The African Union institutions we have established have no real teeth, but are more a process of political consideration, reflection or admonition which can steer African governments in the right direction. They cannot dictate but can only advise, counsel or at best pressurize. They rely more on our African ethos which seeks all-inclusive solutions and consensus.

In this respect, the world was surprised when on the one hand the entire structure and goals of the African Union were predicated on a seemingly unwavering commitment towards democratizing all African states and uprooting from Africa the plagues of tyranny, corruption and mal governance, while, on the other hand the only mechanism set in place to achieve this ambitious goal was the so-called Peer Review Mechanism. Many people have pointed out that this mechanism lacks effectiveness and in the end relies on its capacity of convincing or even pressurizing rather than forcing or dictating democratic changes and compliance with the rule of law.

Unfortunately, in starting from the political end of the process, the agenda of economic integration remained somehow neglected. This was necessary, as our continent does not have multinational companies or economic avenues which could assemble our African economic interests, while government structures are more developed throughout Africa and therefore are easier to assemble. It is my firm belief that the agenda of economic rather than political integration is now more urgent than ever before. I equally believe that this agenda will come to the fore not by the virtue of the actions of African political or economic leaders alone but also because of the integration between Africa and Europe combined with the pressures of the world we live in.

History demands that Africa and Europe grow closer together along the path of economic integration if they are to succeed in confronting the challenges of the future. It is possibly a matter of respective survival in the age of globalization for Africa and Europe to find one another. The age of globalization is creating vast economic blocs, indeed almost economic empires, the like of which history has never seen before. The original area of economic activities bringing together the United States and Canada was broadened by the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement so as to include Mexico. Great pressures now exist for this area to move southward to bring within its encompassing arms the whole of Central and South America.

From the United States there is an unprecedented and seemingly unstoppable flow of production in the field of research and development and intellectual property rights. Companies around the world are marketing products based on US technology, while the same US companies which invented them already hold today intellectual property rights for three or four subsequent generations of technological improvement and development of such products for many decades to come. In a technological society, the added value which underpins the wealth of nations is indeed today as much of technology as two centuries ago it used to be in gold.

On the other hand, another powerful bloc is being consolidating around the rising of China. Any of us who have had the opportunity of comparing the figures of productivity and cost effectiveness coming out of China with the corresponding ones coming out of Africa, Europe, and the Americas will be mesmerized by the fact that there is almost nothing that China cannot produce better, faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world. All the figures indicate that this trend is stable, sustainable and bound to stay with us for many generations to come. We are witnessing just the beginning of the rising of the Chinese dragon and its economic and political influence throughout the East.

The rising of the African continent which we wish to promote takes place as the world is bound to be squeezed between the technological preeminence of the Americans driven by the United States and the productive preeminence of the East driven by China. In this context we must call for a sobering dose of realism and accept that unless we identify our own African path to economic survival in the age of globalization our dream of a politically united, stable and prosperous continent will forever escape its realization.

Europe and Africa have a difficult past characterized by the slave trade, colonialism, inhuman exploitation, racism and oppression. But Europe and Africa have a shared past. We have suffered together with the Europeans even though at times at their hands. It is now time to acknowledge these common roots and the fact that today Africa is what it is also because of colonialism, both in respect of what is good in Africa and what is bad. European influence, presence and legacy in Africa is part and parcel of our own history, and because of it, of who and what we are. We all are the product of that history and to a great extent our African societies are also the product of the European colonial experience of the nineteenth century.

History has enabled us to overcome the colonial experience by means of the many liberation movements which freed our people across the continent. History has also enabled the Europeans to free themselves from their colonial experience projecting them into a cultural, economic and institutional paradigm from which they now look back at some of the horrors of the colonialism with as much horror as we the Africans do.

At the same time, Europe is being strangled by the concomitant problems of lack of internal productivity and lack of competitiveness in the field of technological improvements. This has been recognized by the German Chancellor and the British Prime Minister alike. We as Africans need to begin struggling almost from scratch to create a world-competitive industrial base for our continent so that we may begin having a genuine African car, a genuine African aircraft, a genuinely African high-tech industry and a genuine African industry in the emerging field of biotechnology, the products of which may be sold globally. Conversely, Europe is now struggling to retain its own industrial basis which, piece by piece, is disintegrating as it gets sub-contracted for manufacturing purposes to the Chinese or for research and development purposes to the Americans.

Therefore, I sincerely believe that the next challenge for African leaders is that of engaging the European Union as peers to peers in a dialogue between continents with equal dignity and with equal need for one another. We need this dialogue if both continents are to succeed in the age of globalization. Out of this dialogue, in our continent, we could develop a path of intended integrated economic development with Europe and form our own industrial basis in such a manner that it could serve also the purpose the long-term parameters of an integrated African-European Economic Community. To many people this dream of mine of an African-European Economic Community may be visionary and unrealistic, especially at a time when our continent has closed the chapter of colonialism and racism a mere fifteen years ago.

However, at times I wonder how much more visionary and unrealistic must have appeared the dream of those who conceived of a united Europe a mere five years after the latest and most brutal war which marked the apex of three hundred and fifty years of unceasing conflicts within the European soil. They took the courage to dream beyond the limiting parameters defined by the past to move their dream into a future in which the parameters of what was realizable were only dictated by the strength and dedication with which the dream was pursued. We must do the same. We must move beyond the parameters of whatever remains defined by and within our past, to recognise that our future is dictated by a visionary dream rooted in an inescapable necessity. Africa needs Europe to bring about its own African unity in a manner which can free our continent from the plagues of poverty, underdevelopment, superstition, ignorance, unemployment, corruption, crime and tyranny. Europe needs Africa if it is to find the need markets and productive capacity for its economic expansion.

Economic integration between Africa and Europe does not only make sense but is becoming an increasing necessity. Out of this process achieving Africa's internal integration will become simpler. To a certain extent this is already happening as a great deal of economic integration, coordination and harmonization within Africa has been brought about at times more by the application of the Lome Convention with the European Union than by treaties and conventions amongst African countries themselves.

In the past half a century, I have championed many causes, campaigns and projects. In 1980 I launched the "Buthelezi Commission" to promote dialogue across the then existing deep racial and cultural divides. At that time the very notion of Blacks, Whites and Indians in KwaZulu Natal speaking about common governance was an unrealistic visionary dream. Yet, it became a compelling idea which led to the establishment of the first interracial government of South Africa in the Joint Executive Authority more than ten years ahead of the official date of our liberation. Similarly, in 1979, I conceived the unrealistic and visionary notion of our liberation emerging out of a negotiated settlement rather than an armed struggle and a military confrontation and because of this dream I was attacked by the other components of the liberation movement. In the end the new South Africa was born at the negotiating table and was not delivered by the barrel of a gun.

In January 1992, at the World Economic Form I launched the idea of placing on the immediate agenda of a new South Africa the need of promoting the integration of the African continent, and many criticised my being concerned with matters of this nature while South Africa was still negotiating the terms of its liberation. I knew then, that this was important. I have also championed the cause of federalism at a time in which the now ruling party believed that nothing but a unitary state could work in our country. I have been the outspoken advocate for greater government commitment in the war against HIV/AIDS when people where denying its very nature.

I shall continue to fight for these and the many others of my chosen battles, which however have now found also other and valiant advocates. However, I felt it adequate and appropriate for me to use the forum of the Rotary Club which is indeed a dear and comfortable venue for me, for I am amongst friends, to launch not only this idea of a greater European-African integration but also my own commitment to pursuing and advocating it in any way I can, both in Africa and Europe, in the years to come. I hope to become one of the many advocates who on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea may sponsor this idea and come to bring it to its final fruition.

Against this background it was natural for me to back the recent initiative of the National South Africa Workers Welfare, of which I am the Patron, to broaden its scope of action to become a partner of the recently established South African and European Chamber of Trade and Commerce. This Chamber of Trade and Commerce is one of the practical realizations of the progressive economic integration of Africa and Europe and comes about not because of ideological pressures but out of the very daily necessities of market operators. The National South Africa Workers Welfare will become a partner of the South African European Chamber of Trade and Commerce in a variety of matters including the challenges confronting European companies in terms of social responsibility in black economic empowerment.

You all know that I have been vociferous in criticizing how at times black economic empowerment may become burdensome on foreign investors or even unproductive. Therefore, I appreciate the commitment made in finding ways of bringing about ways in which it can really produce the empowerment of the many as opposed to the enrichment of the few. Black economic empowerment should be about responding to the obligations of social responsibility for the benefits of as many people as possible rather than creating a new distant, and uncaring black elite.

I wish to thank both the Rotary Club and the South African European Chamber of Trade and Commerce for this opportunity. I also wish to acknowledge the contribution of Mr Jelman Haaze, who is with us today as a representative of the Liberal Trade Union of Belgium which has been the primary and initial sponsor of the National South African Worker's Welfare.

We would like to thank the Liberal Trade Union, who in the best spirit of liberal internationalism, provide such marvelous and unstinting support. We simply could not do what we do without your support. I appeal to Mr Haaze to take the message back to Belgium that your organisation's generous support literally spells the difference between life and death for those it reaches.

I hope that they will continue to provide their contribution towards broadening the parameters of  African-European cooperation and economic integration. I also wish to thank the gracious hosts of this evening, especially the President of the Groote Schuur Rotary Club Mr. Alma de Wet, for organizing this occasion which so much falls in the line on the marvelous philanthropic work the Rotary Club has performed for many decades around the world.

I am proud of my long standing association with the Rotary Club and encourage you to continue with your much needed good work.