21 June 1999
Mr Speaker
All of us who speak in this debate today, have the responsibility - if not the duty - to lift the debate out of the pettiness into which it was plunged on Friday. And if we are to perform our tasks - whether as provincial government or opposition - then we require an atmosphere significantly loftier than the contents of the first letter penned from the newly-elected Premier in which, with great indignity and small-mindedness, he threatened to send the bill for the balustrade and the litter to my office. I have refused to respond to this letter lest I share in the responsibility of having lowered the esteem of government.
For esteem and credibility are two critical ingredients required of government. The mandate received by the ANC at a national level forcefully signifies that governments do not thrive by legality alone, and neither do they falter in relation to the great delivery challenges they face. The electorate also needs to believe that the government has its interest at heart, the leaders of government have to be carried with an esteem which comes from dignity, and governments have to act in ways which illustrate that basic dignity. Modern day politicians start off with a credibility deficit, and a surfeit of cynicism. So any political actor, of necessity, has to bear the responsibility of consistently trying to raise the esteem, the dignity and the credibility of the political process and its institutions.
The need for raising the esteem, dignity and credibility of politics in the Western Cape has now joined our other two priorities: uniting our people and eliminating poverty.
The people of the Western Cape require a vision of where we are going as a Province. The fact that our people delivered a political stalemate to the political parties by not giving any one of us an outright victory is the clearest call to us that they wanted us to show maturity and negotiate fundamentally the principles upon which a new government should be constructed.
Unfortunately, among us were leaders who sought more eagerly to divide the spoils of the election war, and refused to hear the pleading of the electorate for us to recast government in the Western Cape in ways which embrace the best of what our parties have to offer, and to shun the worst of our weaknesses. The irony is that we then blame that very electorate for giving us mandates not to find commonground with each other - as if the electorate wrote our posters, penned our pre-election records of understanding and mouthed our rhetoric.
The need to renegotiate the very vision and principles of a new Western Cape government, in the absence of an outright majority, would lead, the ANC believed, to the pinnacle of democracy, not its perversion. For it is easy to take a post of Safety and Security with the office, the car, the bodyguard and the title. But if the principle of redistributing police resources is not agreed upon, then the profile of crime and terror in this Province remains the same, whether dealt with by Mark Wiley or Ebrahim Rasool. I cannot accept that the electorate simply wanted a constitutionally legal government. They wanted a government with the credibility to transform their lives.
It is a great pity that words which carry with them the hopes and aspirations of people - a word such as "transformation" - that such words are also in danger, through wear and tear, of being reduced to mere clichés. But for as long as our Province experiences the extremes of profound and rampant poverty, on the one hand, and shameless opulence, on the other, it will be the duty of any government to define and redefine a concept such as "transformation" until it means a better life for the poverty-stricken and greater security for the privilege.
Transformation in the Western Cape has to mean - as the ANC has pledged to the people of this Province - that the next 5 years must see unprecedented action on 5 fronts.
Firstly, the fight against crime and terror must see a significant shift in police resources to the Cape Flats. Even as we speak in this House, our children are being buried on the Cape Flats. The re-appointment of Mark Wiley can only be a signal that the Premier is satisfied with his performance, but this is certainly not the experience of communities trapped in their homes by criminals and gangsters.
Secondly, the building of houses need to be accelerated and the 3 tiers of government must each play its role with the national subsidies matched by provincial land release and local government ensuring adequate infrastructure. The re-appointment of Cecil Herandien is cynical in the extreme given that his role is being investigated by Judge Heath in the housing development in his constituency of Macassar where a contractor has admitted to receiving money more than 1 year ago, yet 18 houses stands incomplete and 19 have not yet been built, and people are being charged for water consumption at those plots.
Thirdly, our people need jobs, and public works programmes are required to keep our youth out of crime and gangs, and small businesses from disadvantaged communities need greater access to government contracts and tender processes. This has to be a major priority and the ANC will not allow that another year goes by without the implementation of an Affirmative Procurement Programme by the NP-DP Coalition.
Fourthly, greater equality is required in education if all children are going to be employable in the technological and computer age. Coloured and African children do not even get out of the starting blocks in the new job market, yet this government appoints the champion in the defence of white educational privilege as MEC in the Western Cape.
Fifthly, the environment is our most sustainable resource and needs to be protected. Ironically, the environment is not best protected by the MEC for Environment. The person to watch is the MEC in charge of Development Planning, it is there that the environment is either preserved or destroyed. The appointment of Mr Markowitz - as a leading developer - can only be described as dangerous.
Speaker,
Having spelt out what we understand to be the greatest priorities for this Province, and how we think that each one of them is threatened by the NP-DP coalition, the question emerges as to how the ANC will address them from the opposition benches?
We listened with interest as Premier Morkel decried what he called "neo-Apartheid" and called on us to "reject race-based thinking". The problem is not with the sentiment. The problem is with who makes the call. There is something decidedly hollow when a functionary in the apartheid system makes this call. Invariably you ask: why is he making the call? At a superficial level the call is being made to mask the contents of a racist coalition which must go down as the one government in the whole of Africa still dominated by whites and unable to find a single black African to serve in it. A call to "reject race-based thinking" is nothing but a plea to ignore the composition of the cabinet.
More fundamentally, the call to "reject race-based thinking" is a preemptive excuse for continuing the inequalities which persist so doggedly in this Province. I've mentioned affirmative procurement policy which the NP-DP Coalition has refused to implement. Similarly, it would probably be "neo-Apartheid" to call for more police for the Coloured and African areas. It would probably be "racist" to call for a law which bans racists from refusing on racial grounds to cut the hair of Coloured people in our rural towns. I wonder where all this "race-based thinking" originates.
But you see, Speaker, this Province has to confront the past and recognise what everyone else has recognised: that the racial gulf is greater in the Western Cape than elsewhere. Out of this recognition can we all take responsibility to unite our people. In a perverse sense, it took the actual formation of a racially- exclusive coalition to make many people - including liberals who voted DP - to realise that we need to unite our people across racial, linguistic and cultural divides. If this coalition has done any good, then it has dispelled the notion that our non-racialism is free from danger, it has mobilised people from across parties to rally to the defence of a non-racial unity, and it has exposed those who glibly call for a rejection of "race-based thinking".
The ANC, as the midwife of democracy in South Africa, the custodian of transformation, and the nurturer of national reconciliation, cannot abdicate these responsibilities simply because we are an opposition in the Western Cape. Indeed, we now have the responsibility to ensure that these objectives are met from the opposition benches. We are not simply going to be a razor sharp, articulate opposition; because the challenge is more fundamental than keeping the government of the Western Cape accountable.
We have to ensure that the government of this Province heeds the mandate of the most solid block of voters who made the call for transformation to mean the eradication of poverty and racism.
The last week has seen a battle for the interpretation of mass action. Mass action simply means that that which the Constitution provides as a right, and which is regulated by legislation, and which is marshalled by discipline, can become a powerful adjunct of expression to the parliamentary representatives of a cause. Nothing more, nothing less.
We love every inch of this Province - we don't love the grounds around Leeuwenhof more than the rest of this Province. We fully intend to inherit this Province - in all its glory. We do not intend to inherit a wasteland. We have majorities in the two most important municipalities in the Metropole and most of the rural local governments in the Western Cape. The ANC is the national government. All of this suggests that in no way would the ANC want to make of the Western Cape a wasteland.
We will not allow those who have a phobia about mass action, which comes from having been the custodians of apartheid against the mass action of the 1970's and 1980's, to interpret mass action for us.
But the ANC can promsie that an unorthodox opposition will evolve in the Western Cape, focussed on those who retard transformation and loyal to those most in need of relief from poverty and racism.
This is what the ANC promises. An interesting session of this legislature is in the offing.