Newcastle : 14th June 2008
 

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, community leader,

It is my pleasure to welcome you all here this evening. We are very happy you have made the effort to be here, and hope the evening will be as fruitful for you as it will be for us. I am convinced our engagement will be very useful and that we are going to learn a lot from each other this evening.

My name is Albert Mncwango. I will be the programme director this evening. Let me start by explaining our agenda. I will spend 5 minutes explaining why we are here. Rev Musa Zondi, IFP Secretary General will follow, identifying some of the key challenges facing the country. He will take also about 5 minutes. We will then open the meeting to you to make your input: you may do so by way of comments or questions, and we will allocate about one and a half hours to this. We will take note of all inputs made. Mr Blessed Gwala will then close the meeting and lead us in the national anthem.

Friends, about why we are here. The Inkatha Freedom Party is very concerned about the state of the nation. We have been worried for some time that all is not well, but our concerns are mounting year by year. Yes, there have been positive changes and we do acknowledge these. But we should also recognise that in too many fields, there is too much talk and too little action. We are acutely aware of the fact that delivery is not about the promises government makes but the changes it makes in people's lives.

We have produced a draft policy booklet in which we highlight some of the issues we feel strongly about. You should have a copy with you. But we want to say to you that we are not so cocky as to pronounce to the world that we have all the solutions to all that is wrong. No, we do have some ideas about what should be done, but these are not necessarily the best solutions.

To get the best solutions, we need to know what your concerns really are. We need to know what your priorities really are. We need to know what solutions you propose. We need to know what kind of society you want for yourselves and your families. We can't presume to understand all your concerns and so we can't presume either that we know all the answers. What we do know however, and with a high degree of certainty, is that the best starting point must be yourselves, because it is you who are able to assess the extent to which the status quo works for you or does not.

As I say, the only way in which we can be sure that our policies are appropriate is if they address your real life experience. That is why we are here. We have launched a national IFP listening campaign and we are taking this extremely seriously. We are holding such events in the various provinces so that we can truly say that have listened to what the people of our country are saying.

In addition to these public meetings, we have established ten policy teams that are tasked with taking this listening campaign to the smallest community. We are requesting stakeholders or interested parties or communities to contact us so that we may pursue a meaningful dialogue. These teams are each specialising on a single issue, and the 10 critical issues we have highlighted for his listening campaign are: job creation, combating poverty, education, health, the democratic challenge, redressing the past, our foreign relations, the moral challenge, and land. Colleagues from these ten teams are also here on stage tonight. They too, are here to listen.

All this listening will culminate in a policy conference we intend convening in this very province later this year. At this conference, we will distil all we have captured into a single policy document that you, in effect, will have co-authored. May I therefore, in advance of this, thank you for your contribution and thank you for the partnership. Without it, we could not do what we are doing.

So, without any further ado, I call on our Secretary General, Rev Musa Zondi, to make his remarks.

For more information:
Albert Mncwango, 083 448 4896