Through My Eyes

As I listened to the address of the Speaker of the National Assembly at this podium yesterday I was reminded of how far we have come since President Nelson Mandela delivered his first State of the Nation Address. It is important that we take time to reflect on the journey that we have travelled but at the same time to ask whether we have made sufficient progress. We must reflect on where we find ourselves now as a country but also locate that reflection within the shifts that have taken place globally over this period. Tony Judt offers this reflection in his short but powerful book Ill Fares the Land:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

Social transformation is not a gift from the gods and neither is it always a product of cataclysmic events. It is a product of a deep realisation that the conditions under which we live and under which we may raise families are unacceptable and unjust. It is a product of a deep probing of the kind that Judt encourages us to practice.

Social transformation is also a product of the resolve by members of society who decide that no longer will they leave the future of their children to chance. No longer will they accept living in inhumane conditions. When people decide that the health care provided to the sick among them is everyone?s collective problem. That the drugs and crime that rip families and communities apart is everyone?s problem. When education authorities, teachers, learners and parents recognise that they are on the same side, they begin to share a common goal.

Social transformation is a product of being conscious of social injustices; taking decisions to act on those injustices, of planning the course of action and of executing those plans. We have acted according to this spirit from the very founding of the African National Congress in 1912 to the gathering of people from all walks of life in Kliptown in 1955, to the negotiations that gave birth to the democratic South Africa. All of these events in our life as a nation were characterised by a deep sense of recognition that the situation we found ourselves in was untenable and we resolved to do something about it.

We continued in the same vein after 1994 guided by President Nelson Mandela?s words that ?The purpose that will drive this government shall be the expansion of the frontiers of human fulfilment, the continuous extension of the frontiers of the freedom?. It was this approach that guided the drafting and adoption of the Constitution, the revision and replacement of apartheid legislation and the formulation of policies. The establishment of the National Planning Commission was part of this process where as a nation we had to find a more effective approach to addressing our challenges.

Honourable members, ten months ago we presented to President Zuma, this House and the nation the National Development Plan. We presented a product of two years of research and analysis, purposeful dialogue and deliberation on the future of this country. We presented a product in which the National Planning Commission took the opportunity to listen to thousands of South Africans from all walks of life share their thoughts, fears and 3 visions about the future. We presented the Plan which embodies the dreams of the people of this nation.

As WB Yeats writes in his 1899 poem, Cloths of Heaven:
Had I heaven's embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light
I would spread the cloths under your feet,
But I, being poor, have only my dreams
I have spread my dreams under your feet
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

So, clearly we have the country talking about the Plan, but what about action?

Are we able to face the unemployed young people and the thousands living in poverty and say we are not treading on your dreams? Will we be able to hold onto our integrity when they remain locked outside the labour market by the actions we take or fail to take? Will they believe us when our actions sometimes close rather than open opportunities; when we appear to oppose everything without providing any solutions? Will our policy positions hold true when our actions as leaders in the public sector, business and labour exacerbate the living conditions of the poor instead of improving them? How can we look them in the eye when the gap between incomes of the rich and the poor remain so high? Should we not be doing more?

In conclusion, Mr Speaker, I want to reiterate, as a nation we must define what we want to become. This is what the National Development Plan does. To be able to do that, we must know what we are. Knowing what we are includes the recognition that as a nation we are not all that we would like to be. This is the responsibility of history, the recognition of what we are, what we want to be and the journey in between. In dealing with this, it is very important that we, as colleagues, as honourable members of this House understand, always, the burden of responsibility that rests with us. It is the burden, so beautifully articulated in those words of the poet, Yeats, when he says of the poor who have only dreams, ?Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams?