21 May 2002
The President of Fedusa, Ms Mary Moleti,
Secretary-General of Fedusa Mr Chez Milani
Delegates to the Congress,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am very happy to address this important gathering of the leadership of Fedusa. I hope that at the end of this meeting we will reach agreements that will take us further forward in our quest for a South Africa that continues to be on a correct developmental path, offering better conditions for all of us to acquire the necessary skills and expertise so that we can make our humble contribution to the development of our country.
I am confident that during your congress you will have frank and productive discussions among yourselves on all the matters that affect all of us as South Africans.
I am also confident that you will, as members of this important federation, find appropriate ways of rising to the main challenge that we face as a nation today; of lending a hand so as to speed-up the transformation of our country into a non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous democracy, where everyone has equal access to the rights and benefits of being a citizen of this land.
Further, I would like to take this opportunity sincerely to thank the leadership of Fedusa for the commitment and seriousness that you have demonstrated in the work of the Government-Trade Union Working Group. I appreciate your consistency and the high value that you bring to all the Working Group meetings.
I trust that the occasion of this Congress will give Fedusa an opportunity to find practical ways of ensuring that through partnerships, the membership of this important federation will work with government and other sectors in our society, in the reconstruction of our villages, our towns, our cities and our lives.
Among our most important tasks is to ensure that we begin to create the conditions in which our people can prosper, and not only dream about a better life, but can enact our dreams through creativity, through innovation, through actively finding appropriate solutions to problems that arise in the course of our work.
It is very important that the workers represented here, as well as others elsewhere, should form a formidable force that partners government in our work of poverty eradication and the development of our disadvantaged areas, especially through the twin programmes of Sustainable and Integrated Rural Development, as well as Urban Renewal.
We have a joint responsibility as South Africans, to ensure that we banish forever the squalor and degradation that characterizes so many parts of our country.
Lending a hand to push back the frontiers of poverty means that workers, as you who are gathered here today, cannot be mere spectators in the unfolding process of changing, for the better, the lives of our fellow South Africans in the remote rural areas and elsewhere in our country.
Accordingly, I trust and am confident that this important leadership of our people will emerge from this conference with practical ways of strengthening our collective work in improving the infrastructure that will ensure greater access to clean water, to electricity, to telephones, to houses while simultaneously creating sustainable jobs.
All of us are also deeply concerned about the levels of unemployment in our country. We have to focus on this matter continuously to ensure that we overcome this serious problem. I look forward to the Growth and Development Summit on which we have agreed to help us move forward on this matter.
To ensure that this Summit succeeds in its important objectives, all of us will have to ensure that we prepare for it properly and thoroughly. I am certain that Fedusa will play its necessary role in this regard.
As part of this important process of ensuring that South Africans from all walks of life do indeed lend a hand to push back the frontiers of poverty and open access to a better life, we are faced with a challenge of restructuring our society such that we have the appropriate institutions with relevant skills to address our challenges.
In this regard, one of the important programmes is the restructuring of the Labour sector, so that it is able to face the new challenges that are confronting our country and our people.
I am aware that there are on-going discussions about the restructuring agreement that is led by the Minister of Public Service and Administration affecting the public sector. As government we would like to ensure that this restructuring agreement helps constructively to generate more jobs, that we are able to increase the skills level of our people and use those skills in an appropriate way.
Further, we would like to entrench the important aspect of equity in terms of our employment laws, providing for mobility of skills across the three spheres of government, as well as across the length and breadth of our country, in rural and urban areas and in rich and poor areas.
In this regard, it is crucial that the capacities and expertise that we generate and acquire benefit, the totality of the South African people, especially the poor, marginalized, underdeveloped who happen to live in poorly resourced areas in the townships, informal settlements and remote areas of our country.
Accordingly, it is critical to ensure that those of us who are better positioned than the rest of our fellow South Africans, should go an extra mile to assist our country to reach levels of equity in terms of development and deployment of skills and resources.
While this task is, in the main led by government, we will only succeed if we build the necessary partnerships with workers, business people, women and youth.
Furthermore, and in line with our efforts to end poverty and underdevelopment, our task must be to ensure that our people are adequately prepared to deal with the demands of a new society and a new economy, for the transformation of the face of South Africa is also the management of the process of change of our country into a modern, dynamic and competitive economy.
Again, this requires that a workers organisation, such as Fedusa, should assist its members by entering into partnerships that will improve the skills level and enhance the capacity of the membership to deal with the challenges of the information and communication technology.
In addition, we are faced with these tasks in a world where the current forms of globalisation have further deepened the gap between rich and poor countries, where our economic well-being is not simply and wholly dependent on what we do regardless of the global processes, but are influenced, for better or worse, by international forces and processes.
Thus, our attempts to rid ourselves of the deep-rooted legacies of our unfortunate history are compounded by the fact that at the same time as we are addressing the past, we must seek to catch up in the present, through the creation of a skilled populace and the nurturing of a vibrant economy and move ahead at a faster pace and a higher level into the future.
All these challenges means we should bring into being a new worker who is capable of handling, in addition to the traditional concerns of the working people, the complexities of the new economic and social reality.
This new worker should be as concerned with improving his or her lot as he or she is in working towards the collective good of the nation, the continent and the world.
The new worker is one who understands that in the past the manner of the exploitation of our country and our continent's vast mineral wealth, relegated us to being mere exporters of raw materials, we must now recognise the fact that the fate of each country is dependent on the common destiny of all the others and hence our active participation on the processes that are critical and central to the recovery of the African continent.
It is the task and responsibility of the new worker to find practical ways of working with our brothers and sisters from all the countries on the continent so that together we can speed-up the regeneration of our countries, individually and collectively.
Clearly, we have to do this through the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), which is a programme produced by Africans, based on our own experiences of the terrible legacies of slavery and colonialism, the negative consequences of the selfish programmes of the super-powers during the Cold War, and the unfavourable workings of the global economic system that has ensured that our continent remains poor and marginalized.
Obviously, a new worker in South Africa will want to bring about better political and economic governance. A new worker will want to work for a situation where Africa does not continue to be an exporter of cheap labour and raw materials, but that the continent begins to develop the manufacturing and beneficiation capacities that will ensure that we export complete and high value products.
This new worker will want to see Africa occupying her pride of place amongst the nations of the world as a developed and prosperous region that has banished the brutalities of war and conflict; a region that has forever exiled the indecencies of hunger and disease.
This new worker will want the African Union (AU) to succeed so that each and every government on our continent will be accountable to the mass of our people, and that a better life for all begins to become a reality.
The new worker must also fully comprehend the impact of information technology on society, on the economy, the impact on national sovereignty of the process of globalisation and the rapid growth of global systems of governance.
Accordingly, all of us will agree that one of the primary challenges facing the working people is the technological revolution and entry to the information age, ensuring a smooth ride on the information highway without falling by the wayside.
Clearly, if we are to catch up with the rest of the world, as South Africans, we have to build strong and enduring partnerships. Already, government has entered into agreement with employers and the unions to ensure that using the Skills Levy, we have the possibility of addressing the shortage of skills in our country.
Recently, government through the Department of Labour has made available R1, 1 billion to the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETA). 18 projects have been established through this process. To ensure that we move with the necessary speed and appropriately train many of our working people, it is important that the trade union organisations such as Fedusa, put effective monitoring mechanisms for this training process.
I therefore would like to urge that one of the important outcomes of this gathering should be a clear and practical programme of ensuring that there are skills plans in every place of employment and that the money from the Skills Levy produces a new worker who will be fully equipped to increase the pace of the development of our country and continent.
It is clear that for the new worker to have a passport into the new age of technology and into this new phase of global developments, it is critical that we assist one another to undergo the necessary intensive processes of skilling and re-skilling. This we should do, so as to meet the challenges of the modern economy and ensure that our country is in a better position to compete with the best in the world.
I am confident that together we can address the myriad of challenges that face our people, our communities, our nation and our continent.
This important gathering of the leadership of Fedusa should assist us in our on-going struggle to entrench democracy, ensure equity in every aspect of our lives, build the necessary partnerships that will help to accelerate the pace of the transformation of our country, working together to push back the frontiers of poverty and access to a better life.
Once more, thank you very much for your invitation and best wishes for the success of this Second FEDUSA National Congress.
I thank you.