Honourable Speaker

So the Honourable Premier has delivered another End of the Year Report, full of big words and empty gestures, but devoid of any real meaning. There is no shortage of delusion.

The Premier believes that he is running a clean government, he imagines that he is enhancing democracy, he insists that he is objective with regard to the province’s heritage, he even claims to be re-connecting the province with the world. And to those with social or economic concerns, he is promising more pie in the sky.

The Premier is talking in the best ANC tradition. He is simply promoting a nation of slogans. Better life for all, better health for all, and the like.  It all looks good on paper. But it has little or no relation to the reality on the ground.

Those who care to look beyond the Premier’s empty propaganda, can see a government with misplaced priorities, a government which is inherently sleazy, a government which is biased and selective, a government which has run out of ideas, and a government which is high-spending and irresponsible.

The ANC’s failings in governing this country and province are numerous: some are monumental such as the disastrous handling of HIV/Aids and the province’s health and education systems, others revolve around programmes and initiatives that never take off and targets that persistently fall short.

And then there is the ruling party’s self-righteousness coupled with its myopic view of the moral high ground dating back to the struggle against apartheid.

Given all this, it is clear that the Premier’s priorities are entirely misplaced. Where he boasts enhancing democracy through izimbizo, he should really be drawing up contingency plans to combat HIV/Aids and the related opportunistic infections.

The South Africans have so far paid an unnecessary price for this deadly pandemic. This province continues to have the highest incidence of HIV/Aids in the whole world!  The pandemic is an indictment on our society when one considers our relative wealth and resources.

The uprooted communities, families torn apart, street children, orphans and child-headed households and all the pain and suffering that accompanies them is not so much the result of the disease which can now be managed with anti-retrovirals and a sensible lifestyle. All this is the result of unclear, tardy and ultimately callous policies pursued stubbornly and relentlessly by the ruling party since the advent of democracy in 1994.

It is presumably this democracy that the Premier imagines he is enhancing.  How?  Measuring the quality of South African democracy by the quantity of izimbizo is plainly ridiculous. It is a dangerous delusion. The truth is that izimbizo are contrived and cynical media opportunities where people, many of them genuinely desperate, are bribed into so-called “public participation” with a single square meal.

To the Premier it is clearly quantity, not quality that matters. He fondly recalls a record-setting izimbizo where people asked as many as 75 questions.  We would like to hear the Premier’s 75 answers and, even more importantly, 75 realistic solutions.

There is a similar obsession with public forums. Their numbers are steadily growing as their real focus is steadily narrowing. How representative are they? We already know that the ANC’s idea of civil society is trade unions, trade unions and trade unions.

The Premier also imagines that he is running a transparent government. He believes this against a curious backdrop of over-spending, financial and personnel mismanagement and dubious tenders across government departments.

To prove his point, the Premier has supplied a personal example. He accepted a number of Nguni cattle as part of a government-sponsored and tax-funded programme aimed at preserving the cattle and benefiting the disadvantaged.  Only after he was caught red-handed, did the Premier ceremoniously return the cattle. This is his idea of transparency. A wrongdoing such as accepting a political favour has in his strange interpretation not only become acceptable, it is now a virtue.

The Premier similarly claims a monopoly over protecting our province’s heritage. We in the IFP acknowledge that KwaZulu-Natal has a strong cultural heritage. That goes without saying. After all, Inkatha started off as a cultural organisation. But it is clear that the Premier has ulterior motives.  His government’s treatment of historical and cultural contributions by stalwarts who were exiled is, at best, selective.

Only consider Inkosi Dinuzulu who provided refuge to Inkosi Bhambatha’s wife at Usuthu which earned him arrest, imprisonment and exile to Middelburg where he died in 1913. Despite this, the Premier has only chosen to honour Inkosi Bhambatha of the Zondi clan.

Equally curious is the Premier’s about-turn on the subject of the commission of inquiry to investigate and report on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal which he conceived, promoted and then quietly shelved. The Premier does not explain satisfactorily why this commission was abandoned.  Are we to surmise that the terms of reference were not carefully thought through?  Was the commission motivated by vindictiveness and revenge? On a related note – what happened to the commission of inquiry into the so-called arms cache discovered in the Ulundi Legislature?

The Premier is right to congratulate our police service, namely its provincial Commissioner Ngidi and his team.  However, he neglects to add that their proud achievements are despite generally low police morale, poor salary packages and members benefits and often inadequate personnel.

That the incumbent provincial government has run out of ideas and has to repeat itself is best illustrated by the Premier’s “international endeavours”.  The list of accomplishments is simply copied and pasted from the Premier’s parliamentary performance during Taking Parliament to the People at KwaNgwanase.  What is more, many of the accomplishments are not even his own.

For example, the Premier mentions now as he did at KwaNgwanase that Belgium has committed a R60-million grant over five years at R12-million a year to our food security programme. I can add that Belgium indeed did so, only under my - not Mr Ndebele’s premiership - back in 2002.

As much as the Premier boasts about the initiatives we would never hear about otherwise, he has remained silent on one issue which seems to have pre-occupied his party and his administration in recent months.

Considering that this province already has two available parliamentary venues, that this House has use for a permanent parliamentary venue for fewer than twenty days in a year when it is in session and that the ruling party lacks a vision as far as provinces are concerned, this administration has decided – virtually in secret and against the wishes of the opposition parties and the public at large – to build a third parliamentary complex.

Under such bleak circumstances, it is up to the IFP as the province’s Official Opposition to talk sense. The IFP is here to inspire hope and courage to communities that have been promised a utopia since 1994. The IFP is a party of clean administration, free from graft, corruption and scandals. The IFP urges fiscal prudence. The IFP prioritises the fight against HIV/Aids and genuine service delivery. The IFP will be back in 2009.

I thank you.