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Volume 12, No. 7, 21 February 2013 |
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Red Alert Speech by SACP General Secretary and the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande at the National Assembly Debate on the State of the Nation |
Speaker/Deputy Speaker
Honourable Members
Under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma, both as President of our Republic and that of the ANC, and building upon the achievements of the ANC since 1994, education has been declared and made an apex priority for our country since 2009. If Verwoerd and his criminal apartheid regime of 1948 had said the black child must not study mathematics and no black worker must become a skilled artisan, President Zuma has emphatically said the black child must indeed study and be competent in Mathematics and that we must increase the production of new artisans, including black artisans!
President Zuma has not only said these things, but has led from the front through leading concrete interventions in education as part of inverting and destroying the Verwoedian legacy. In 2009 President Zuma decided to split the former department of education into two. This was indeed a stroke of genius that is beginning to bear fruit.
The Department of Higher Education and Training has developed a vision of post-school education and training and has already made some significant practical advances that is beginning to improve opportunities for our youth and adults in acquiring further education and skills. Under the leadership of President Zuma, FET College enrolments have grown substantially over the last few years - from about 350 000 in 2010 to over 650 000 in 2012, almost doubling. This has been made possible through a variety of strategies including a concerted effort to raise popular consciousness around the possibilities provided by an FET education, through the introduction of fee-free education for poor students in FET Colleges and the expansion of shorter skills courses offered in FET Colleges with the assistance of the SETAs.
Parenthetically, the leader of the IFP stated yesterday that the President only wanted to provide jobs for 11 000 young people. This is a serious misunderstanding, if not deliberate distortion of what the President said. What the President said, was to appeal for placements for the 11 000 recent FET graduates who are still awaiting placements. As important as this is, it does not constitute the entirety of government job creation efforts for the youth.
A turnaround strategy to improve the quality of FET College teaching and management has been developed. This includes short term interventions to stabilise some of the weaker colleges, the appointment of qualified CAs as chief financial officers in 43 of the 50 FET Colleges, the development of specialised qualifications for college lecturers, special interventions to strengthen student support, and so on. A review of the curriculum of the National Certificate (Vocational), i.e. NCV, is being undertaken to tackle some of the challenges associated with the current curriculum including R 2.5 billion for the current MTEF period to upgrade their infrastructure, announced by the President last year.
Under the leadership of President Zuma, NSFAS funding for loans and bursaries to students in universities and colleges have expanded massively from R2.375 billion in 2008 to well over R6 billion this year. FET College students coming from poor backgrounds and following occupational programmes are now completely exempted from paying fees. This is indeed the first ever in our country, under the leadership of President Zuma! This has meant that bursary funds for FET College students coming from poor families have increased from R310 million in 2009 to R1.75 billion in 2012 and to reach R2 billion in 2013. Such a massive increase, largely to the benefit of poor black students, has never ever happened in our country before. It is happening for the first time under President Zuma.
Over the next 3 years, we have set aside R1.7 billion for building new university student accommodation and universities are contributing an additional R0.6 billion. Of the R2.3 billion total, R1.4 billion will be spent on student accommodation at historically disadvantaged institutions where the need is greatest. This will provide 9 000 new beds in our universities. Overall for university infrastructure, the Department is spending R6 billion over this 3-year MTEF period, with an additional R2 billion in co-funding from the universities' own coffers, with an estimated 37 000 direct jobs being created.
The government is now committed to establishing three new universities which will help to expand our capacity and access to higher education. These include the two new universities in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape whose first students will be admitted next year. These will be the first universities of a democratic South Africa, and R2,1 bn has been set aside for such infrastructure; and about 11 242 direct jobs will be created during the construction phase. In addition we are establishing a new comprehensive university of health sciences to be established on the Medunsa campus which is being demerged from the University of Limpopo. I must emphasise that this will be more than just a demerger. The new university will be a much expanded institution and will include not only the training of medical doctors, but also other health professionals such as dentists, veterinarians, nurses, physiotherapists, medical technologists, radiographers, and so on.
As we are all aware, government is seriously committed to accelerating the delivery of infrastructure to spearhead our country's growth. Each of the Strategic Integrated Projects (SIPs) are sites for skills development and every SIP will have a comprehensive skills development plan.
I want to emphasise that, whatever the challenges we may face, we have made substantial progress over the last decade and a half in relation to schooling, with even more significant advances under President Zuma. The 2011 census shows that our educational levels have increased significantly; the proportion of South Africans with a Grade 12 education or higher has risen from 28.8% in 2001 to 40.7% in 2011, an increase of 41.3%. School participation rates of 7 to 15 year olds in 2011 was 98.8%.
One of our most notable achievements has been the very significant expansion of Grade R enrolments, meaning that most children start with their formal education a year younger than was previously the case. The proportion of five year olds in school increased from 45.6% in 2001 and to 81.2% in 2011. This, together with our efforts to improve the quality of teaching has begun to show up in the results of the Annual National Assessments (the ANAs). In Grade 3, the national average performance in Literacy was 52% in 2012, as compared to 35% in 2011, registering an improvement of 17%. In Grade 3 Numeracy, our learners performed at an average of 41% as compared to 28% in 2011. Our Grade 6 Mathematics results have been disappointing with an average performance of 27% as compared to 30% in 2011. Every effort will now be made to reverse this. Our Grade 6 results for Language, however, showed a substantial improvement.
The focus on the ANAs is the result of our increasing realisation that the Grade 12 pass rate is just one of many indicators of the health of the schooling system. Nonetheless, it is clear from the steady improvement in results in the National Senior Certificate that the education system has stabilised and is improving. A key indicator of better Grade 12 results is the number of learners qualifying for university studies at the Bachelors level. The 2012 figure of 136 047 is almost exactly double the level it was in 2000. The results of the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), released late last year provide the first indication ever from an internationally standardised testing system that substantial quality improvements are occurring in the South African schooling system.
Other significant achievements include the Department of Basic Education's undertaking to provide over 50 million workbooks annually to learners. The School Nutrition programme has now increased significantly to cover 8.8 million learners in about 21 000 primary and secondary schools. In December 2012, the National School Build Programme under the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Committee was launched to address national backlogs in classrooms, libraries, computer laboratories, media centres and administration buildings while embracing long-term infrastructure planning and budgeting. As the President said, by the end of this financial year alone we would have built 98 schools, over 40 of them in the Eastern Cape. This shows that government is being programmatic in tackling mud schools and other inappropriately build school structures, contrary to the ridiculous claims by the DA.
In the light of all this, we call upon our youth and parents to make full use of these opportunities. We call upon our communities to get closer to our schools, colleges and universities, to make sure that they are functioning. We call upon the trade union movement to mobilise its members to ensure that education does indeed become an apex priority in practice.
So when the opposition, the DA and its other lackeys, the DA-Lite, their own version and concoction of 'Coke Lite', say they have lost confidence in President Zuma, they are expressing their unhappiness about the advances made by the ANC under the leadership of President Zuma, to change the educational opportunities for the majority of our people for the better. This is President Zuma's so-called "failure", according to them. All these achievements mean very little to the DA and its constituency, because it is representing the rich and other elites. Kubantu bakwaDambuza ababengazi ukuthi ugesi uyangena endlini yodaka, namhlanje bayaqhaklaza ngogesi owafika noKhongolose!
To the leader of the IFP we want to say, we have made all these advances because our people fought and defeated the apartheid regime, including by taking up arms. We went to the TRC because we had nothing to hide, and ours was a legitimate struggle against an illegitimate regime. Faced with the same challenge we would do the same.
It must also be said that it is improper and extremely opportunistic for the IFP to say they did not appear before the TRC and its Amnesty Committee, but yet come and raise matters that should have been raised through those processes before this House. This is abuse of parliamentary privilege. Do not raise these matters here as this parliament or the STATE of the Nation Debate, does not have the capacity to verify the truthfulness or otherwise of the IFP's claims about its role during the apartheid era. Ngoba aniyanga kwi Khomishane yamaQiniso, kungcono nithule nize nife ngezinto okwakufanele niyozisho ngaphambi kwayo.
I want to say that our record of the struggle against the apartheid regime and its crimes will not be measured by whether we appeared or did not appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Amnesty Committee. As a student of historical materialism for the past 33 years I now know that our struggle against, or collaboration, with the apartheid regime, will be told by HISTORY! HISTORY has got its own way of telling the truth, no matter how long it takes, about what roles our respective organisations played in the struggle against apartheid. HISTORY never forgets. HISTORY also tends to be very stubborn with its facts, and these facts will always in the end come out, no matter how long it may take. Ngamanye amazwi umlando uyayixoxa indaba yawo uma isikhathi sesifikile. Noma imnandi noma yimbi, noma ngabe ibuhlungu kangakanani umlando uyilanda indaba injengoba injalo.
Instead history will judge President Zuma as a leader who did what he said in making education an apex priority! The ANC and our Alliance as a whole have full confidence in you as the President.
Thank you Speaker.
Speech by SACP 1st Deputy General Secretary and the Deputy Minister of Public Works, Cde Jeremy Cronin at the National Assembly Debate on the State of the Nation
Mr President, your State of the Nation Address and the subsequent two days of debate have been marked essentially by two contrasting standpoints - on the one hand, a President, an ANC and an ANC-led government sharing with the country a perspective on important progress that is under-way across a wide scope of sectors and regions. This is concrete progress, notwithstanding many remaining challenges, that is being achieved not by government or the ANC alone. It is progress that we are making together as South Africans, through consultation, through popular mobilisation, often through tough engagements in the midst, sometimes, of crises, in which competing sectoral interests are aired and a common line of action is thrashed out.
That is one side of the story of this SONA debate - an ANC and an ANC-led government taking responsibility for listening to, engaging with and mobilising the energies and aspirations of the widest array of South Africans, across the public and private sectors.
On the OTHER side, in this debate - with a few welcome exceptions (like the speakers for the APC, AZAPO and the UDM) - we have observers, we have an opposition bloc focused on division, negativity, and carping.
Mr President you, and subsequent ANC speakers in this debate, have laid great stress upon the National Development Plan. You correctly noted that it has been endorsed by a wide spectrum of South Africans as a 20 year vision and as a broad road-map to address the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and crisis levels of unemployment.
This is OUR approach to the National Development Plan. The opposition parties have also endorsed (or should I say paid lip-service to?) the Plan. But what informs their approach to the NDP is a very ignoble objective. It is not to build collective South African unity in action - but rather to be divisive, to be oppositional for the sake of opposition, to drive wedges.
They seek to twist and distort NDP to pit the government against the labour movement, the ANC against teachers. They vainly want to play the National Development Plan off against the New Growth Path. They seek to launch the unemployed against the working poor.
Opportunism, short-termism, narrow-mindedness is the name of their game.
The Honourable Mazibuko (writing in the Sunday Independent, Feb 17) tells us that President Zuma "pays nominal lip service ... to the National Development Plan. But his heart is with the outdated heavy hand of the government of the New Growth Path...he remains wedded to the discredited concept of government interventionism in the economy."
Bizarrely, in the very next sentence, the Hon Mazibuko is advising President Zuma to "look at the success of our fellow Brics partners..." Does she honestly believe that the economic practices in India, or Brazil, or Russia, or CHINA are LESS state interventionist than our own?
The DA portrays the National Development Plan as if it were essentially a laissez-faire manifesto. Leave business to business, they tell us. Government, they tell us, hiding behind their misrepresentation of the NDP for their authority, shouldn't "second-guess" the so-called market.
That arch-Thatcherite, Mr Lorimer, DA, told us yesterday that "if there was money to be made in beneficiation, then business would have done it long ago." There you have it - beneath all the professed concern for the poor and the unemployed, the real yardstick of viability for anything is whether short-term, mega-profits can be sucked out of SA, whether the voracious appetites of a cosmopolitan few can be fed. If not, Lorimer is telling us, it can't be done. That is NOT the yardstick we use for assessing the economic viability or social desirability of doing something, including beneficiation. You might as well as say that we shouldn't deal with acid mine drainage in Gauteng, "After all, if there was money to be made in cleaning up the acid mine drainage, business would have done it long ago." For us the key priorities are long-term economic, social and environmental sustainability and job creation - and it is a perspective we believe that is shared by most South Africans, including serious business-people, and serious investors.
While decrying the alleged "interventionist" nature of the New Growth Path, or of our beneficiation policies, the DA quickly abandons its own free market fundamentalism when it comes to dealing with the working class and the LABOUR MARKET. Here, of course, they want autocratic state intervention into the market.
The Hon. Mazibuko reacted to Thursday's State of the Nation Address by saying that the President had "failed" to intervene decisively by NOT unilaterally, top-down proclaiming the implementation of a "youth wage subsidy".
The attempts to goad government into anti-worker, union-bashing have also been in evidence on the education front. The DA knows full well that it is not just COSATU and its affiliate SADTU that have opposed an outright ban on strikes in the education sector - all other union federations and teacher professional bodies have opposed such a move. We are into the Oscar Film awards season, and here the Rev. Kenneth Meshoe must surely receive a belated nomination for best male Comedy performance. He told us on the post-SONA "After 8 debate" on SABC that "teachers should only be allowed to strike...after work" (!!)
Of course, seeking to build consensus does not mean that as the ANC-led government we should not take a firm line on key principles and provide leadership, not just to the union movement, but also to the business sector, to communities, to all South Africans. You did this, Mr President, for instance, by clearly signalling that in the legitimate exercise of the right to strike or protest, Government would NOT tolerate violence, the injuring or killing of others, or the wanton destruction of property, especially public property. You spent some time making this point.
However, in another Oscar-winning performance a certain leader of an opposition Party (name with-held) was so busy handing out Valentine's Day flower bouquets that he forgot to listen your SONA speech. He told the public broadcaster that you had failed to condemn violence in strikes and public protests!!! What can one say? Perhaps the best we can suggest is (and with all due respect to all concerned, including the Catholic Church) - isn't it time that some on the opposition benches followed the example of Pope Benedict the 16th?
De Doorns
The Honourable Mazibuko, for a brief moment, spoke movingly about the plight of the unemployed poor. She asked us to put ourselves in the place of a mother without work or food for her family. She asked us to imagine being a young person with little hope of finding employment. It was moving and I wanted to believe in the sincerity of what she was saying. But then, as soon as the Honourable Trollip stood up - the spell was broken.
The concern of the DA for the unemployed poor is, at best, a 19th century philanthropic concern. The DA's real interest in the unemployed is as cannon-fodder to be deployed against the employed, against the working-poor, against the labour movement.
When the Honourable Trollip dealt with the recent strikes in the Boland, in De Doorns and elsewhere, he had a lot to say about unruly worker behaviour, he accused (in fine apartheid era style) COSATU personalities and others of being "agitators" and "opstokers" (although, truth be told, COSATU had very little to do with the original strike action). Not a word about the systemic violence experienced day-in-and-day-out by farmworkers. Not a word about the main disease profile that the local De Doorns Stofland clinic is dealing with - it,s not HIV/AIDS or TB (they are problems), it's malnutrition, particularly among the children of labour brokered workers from Lesotho and Zimbabwe working on these Boland farms - so much for their much vaunted ability to provide food security (for whom, one wonders).
For the DA if you are poor and passive you can be pitied. But the moment you are working for a boss, if you are employed, even at starvation wages, and especially if you rise up, no longer just as a victim but as a protagonist for change - then the paternalistic mask of empathy quickly slips. Suddenly, the Honourable Mazibuko's empathy for the poor and down-trodden flies out of the window.
The DA MEC for Agriculture in the Western Cape is completely conflicted in this matter - he's a farmer! Premier Zille was also conflicted, electorally conflicted. She didn't know whether to back her farm-owner supporters, or her potential Coloured voters. She issued perhaps her most disgraceful statement ever. Flirting with a potentially xenophobic tinder-box, she attributed the strikes and unrest to rivalry between Coloured farm-workers, African workers from the Eastern Cape, and labour-brokered Basotho and Zimbabwean workers. Although there had been inter-ethnic tensions of this kind in previous years, for instance in Grabouw. Last year and earlier this year, the farm protests were characterised by a remarkable CLASS unity among Coloured, African and non-national workers, united in a struggle against oppression and super-exploitation.
The Constitution
The opposition parties pay lip-service to the National Development Plan, while gutting it of its core values. They masquerade behind their misreading of the plan in order to disguise their fundamentally reactionary, anti-majority policies.
They play exactly the same game with the Constitution. The Honourable Mazibuko (in her Sunday Independent SONA response) informs us, in regard to the challenges of land reform, that "the Constitution PRESCRIBES the 'willing-buyer', 'willing-seller' principle."
Which Constitution is that?? The actual Constitution prescribes something very different. The Bill of Rights Section 25 (5) prescribes that: "The state MUST take reasonable legislative and other measures...to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an EQUITABLE [not narrowly, market-based] basis."
If you want to accuse us of not complying with the Constitution, then accuse us of not moving rapidly enough with land reform, accuse us of being too slow to move away from a purely market-based "willing-buyer, willing-seller" approach - but don't deliberately distort the Constitution for your own reactionary purposes.
Mr Speaker, it is unparliamentary to accuse another member of lying to, or of deliberately misleading this House. So I will refrain from making any such accusation.
Yes, as we take forward the land reform process in this, the Centenary year of the barbaric 1913 Land Act, we will stick to the transformational spirit and the precise letter of the Constitution. The Constitution outlaws any arbitrary deprivation of property. The state may expropriate only in terms of a law of general application for a PUBLIC PURPOSE or in the PUBLIC INTEREST. The Constitution explicitly defines PUBLIC INTEREST to include "the nation's commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa's natural resources..."; and it adds, for good measure, "property is not limited to land."
Yes, compensation must be paid for any such expropriation. But again the Constitution is extremely clear - "the market value of the property" is only ONE of FIVE criteria to be used in determining such compensation. Other criteria, include "the history of the acquisition and use of the property".
Terror Lekota
I would be doing a disservice to this debate if I were to neglect the valuable contribution of the Honourable Lekota. He gave us a lecture on dealing with "redundancies" in the public sector. He is, of course, an expert on dealing with redundancies. Offering yourself up for swallowing by the DA is, I suppose, one form of dealing with redundancy.
The Hon. Lekota told us (or rather shouted at us) yesterday, saying:
"They forget their people" ("they" being us in the ANC); "They forget their communities"; "They forget we shared mielies together in prison and spoke of a better life for all".
Well, the Hon. Lekota also FORGETS. He forgets what HE did when he was one of the longest serving Ministers of Defence in post-1994 SA.
He characterises the National Keypoints Act as "dastardly apartheid legislation" - and he is probably right. This Parliament does need to look at this anachronistic and problematic piece of legislation, it may well be unconstitutional.
But the Hon. Lekota forgets that it has got his finger-prints all over it. On 26 March 2004 by proclamation as Minister of Defence he piloted a change to the Act. Did he use the opportunity to transform this piece of legislation dealing with security around sensitive localities to be in line with our new democracy? In line with our Constitution? No - he simply changed the definition of the responsible minister from Defence to Police, passing the buck.
The Honourable Lekota expresses outrage at the expense of security arrangements at President Zuma's private residence at Nkandla. But the Hon. Lekota forgets that, if I am not mistaken, it was under his watch that the Department of Defence was involved in the security assessment at the Nkandla residence - which laid the basis for the probably excessive and undoubtedly extremely costly security operational requirements put in place.
I am not laying the entire blame on the Hon. Lekota - I am just trying to help cure his amnesia. As the current Minister of Defence, the Hon Mapisa Nqakula made very clear yesterday - as the current government we are not running away from our responsibilities in this matter, and we will not sweep abuse under the carpet.
We take responsibility. This was a core theme of your SONA speech Mr President. And again this contrasts sharply with the posture of the DA. In the course of her speech yesterday, the Hon. Mazibuko let slip an interesting state of mind. Gazing through a speculative long-range telescope into some distant future she announced that there "is HOPE". One day the DA would win a national majority. "There will be a day when the DA will serve the entire country." Doesn't this give the game away? They don't see themselves serving the entire country now.
Provincialism
They all too often reduce politics in SA to an inter-provincial ABSA Currie Cup competition.
As the ANC and ANC-led Government we are concerned about all the provinces of our country - regardless of which political party happens to be in the provincial majority. We celebrate successes in the Western Cape, and we share concerns about challenges in that province - as with any other province. Our commitment is to our country and its people, and not to a narrow party political electoralism.
But, of course, we are constantly treated to DA-boasting about how well the Western Cape is doing, as if it was all simply down to them. Historic advantages, the absence of a Bantustan legacy, and other deep structural realities are simply blotted out.
But okay, just for a moment, and at the risk of getting sucked into an Absa Currie Cup mode, let's look at comparative provincial statistics for what we all agree is the MOST important target of all in our country - job creation, and particularly youth job creation. If we look at the labour market statistics for the "New Growth Path" period - 3rd quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2012 - then we find an interesting pattern.
In terms of the change in employment numbers per province for this period, then it will come as no surprise that in terms of sheer numbers Gauteng does the best with 217,000 more in employment over this 2-year period. But, interestingly, Limpopo comes a close second with an increase of 184,000 in jobs, followed by KZN with 124,000. The Western Cape trails in at fourth position with an increase of 56,000 for the same period.
In terms of percentage increases, Limpopo is way ahead with a remarkable 20% increase in employment numbers, followed by Gauteng and KZN at 5%, with the Western Cape trailing in 7th place at 3%.
The figures for this two year period for youth employment are fairly similar. Most new jobs for youth were created in Limpopo, Gauteng and the Northern Cape.
Now, I am not quoting these statistics in order to fall into the same ABSA Currie Cup game that the DA likes to play (when it suits them, of course). There are complex reasons for this pattern of job creation which cannot simply be reduced to an electoralist discourse. However, what surely cannot be doubted is that the remarkable performance of Limpopo has a great deal to do with the state-led, infrastructural programme under the auspices of the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission, specifically Strategic Integrated Project One ("unlocking the northern mineral belt").
In the course of this State of Nation debate the opposition parties have, once more, side-lined themselves from the broad, consensus-building processes underway in our country to address our many challenges - whether in the mining sector, or in regard to unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, land hunger and sustainable rural livelihoods, or transforming the lives of teachers or farm-workers. This is a self-inflicted marginalisation on their part.
I am sure, Mr President, in your response to the SONA debate tomorrow you will, once more, generously invite the opposition parties to come down off their high perch of self-righteousness and join the rest of SA in the often complex and essential consensus-building process that is well under way - as we progressively roll-back poverty, unemployment and inequality.
Whether they will hear you...well that's another matter entirely.
