ADDRESS BY PREMIER TSP MAKWETLA AT THE OPENING OF THE FIRST SESSION OF THE THIRD LEGISLATURE OF MPUMALANGA
Riverside Government Complex
Friday 04 June 2004
Madame Speaker and Deputy Speaker,
Honourable members of the Mpumalanga Legislature
Honourable members of Parliament
Honourable MECs
Your Excellencies Ambassadors and High Commissioners
Your Majesties Amakhosi
Chairperson of the House of Traditional Leaders
Representatives of Local Government, Mayors
Distinguished guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
On the occasion of the first convocation of the newly elected representatives of the people of this province to begin the daunting but exciting task of turning into reality the lofty goals we advocated during the elections, allow me once again, to salute the masses of our province and their talented leadership across all areas and sectors of human endeavour, and say indeed to be free, we too must strive to live our dreams
In this context, let me take this opportunity to acknowledge all our important guests; leaders of this region of all pursuits; our traditional leaders as already acknowledged before; our religious leaders; our political leaders from all parties; our business leaders; labour leaders; leaders of various organs of the state; senior civil servants and leaders of parastatals; community leaders of all pursuits and leaders of non-governmental organisations. The fortunes and prosperity of our province are in your hands, just as they are in ours.
We all have reason to believe that our province is poised to make further advances in many respects in the quest to make it a better place for its citizens and future generations.
The possibilities are real, we must underline, because there were two administrations before this third one, whose work constitute the foundation from which we can launch a fresh offensive on underdevelopment and the pulverising poverty that still grip many of our communities.
To show grit and conviction in order to conquer poverty, we must turn our provincial government into an economic administration of excellence and efficiency. In this regard, we must build further our provincial administration by consciously tackling the challenges beyond the transformation imperatives of restructuring, rationalisation and unification of our civil service.
To achieve this, we all support the compelling argument to conduct a skills audit of our departments across the board, in order to identify the gaps and shortfalls.
In the spirit of cultivating partnerships in the delivery of services as government, our departments, without exception, are enjoined to establish partnerships with research centers, including those that are in institutions of higher learning, and policy institutes, to augment our capacities.
As government we will also honour our obligation as an employer to avail opportunities for further training of our employees to acquire the requisite capacities in several areas of government at the same time.
Madame speaker, honourable members, equally important in the task of enhancing the capacity of our administration of the province to deliver, is the need to promote professionalism among our civil servants and to ensure revolutionary ethos, which include among others, high levels of integrity and respect for the resources of the needy public.
Over the past decade, we have made concerted efforts to redress poverty and inequality through a substantial redirection of public spending towards key social and economic programmes. We recognise that the pace of economic growth had to be accelerated.
We correctly concluded that investment in industry and infrastructure and an expansion of job opportunities were critical challenges if we are to raise this country and province from the legacy of the past. Simply put our task was to accelerate the pace of growth and job creation and extend the scope of development and empowerment.
As we enter the Second Decade of Freedom, our main challenge remains speeding up the creation of work and further strengthening the fight against poverty.
Madame Speaker, our gene-coefficient is lower than the national average and yet our province has enormous wealth-creation ability. We are the fourth biggest economy nationally and yet among the smaller provinces considering our population. We are a province of rich farmers and wretched farm-labourers; of rich plantation owners and extremely poor plantation workers; of extravagantly wealthy mine-owners and very poor mine workers; of world-class industrial giants and over-populated jobless Bantustan areas.
Our challenge to conquer poverty and under-development is made exciting by the very existence of a first world economy alongside under-development and poverty. With the requisite commitment on the part of all of us, to develop this province into a prospering region, we can surpass our expectations.
In eradicating poverty and underdevelopment we must as a matter of course encourage the growth, development and modernisation of our regional economy, thereby increasing its ability to create jobs in order to provide more people with incomes.
Government must provide the necessary support to the provincial economic growth-drivers such as our world-class industrialists, like SASOL and Columbus Stainless Steel, the farming sectors and tourism.
In this regard the provincial government undertakes to tackle the infrastructural needs of these big role players such as the provincial roads infrastructure. In this financial year government will spend approximately R276-million on roads infrastructure. The conditions of our roads in the far South-Eastern part of our province are reaching a calamitous level. The government will convene a roads Indaba in the next six months to address this challenge.
Equally, we want to see industrial giants like SASOL opening up opportunities for broad participation of previously marginalised communities through equity and procurement policies.
Above all SASOL must show the way in promoting modern and progressive labour policies and social responsibility initiatives. SASOL should not only be a world-class industrial giant technologically, but SASOL must also be known for the good treatment of its workers. SASOL as an establishment can indeed brand itself through the high living standards of its employees. The same goes for our SAPPIs, Columbus Steel and others.
The intention of government is to make our farming sector even more robust and competitive. To achieve this, government will conduct an inspection of the capacities of our agricultural research centres with the view to committing more funds to increase excellence in our agricultural sector. The agricultural college in Nelspruit will receive our urgent attention to ensure that its purpose is optimally served.
It is our considered view that with the necessary support and comparative advantage our agriculture enjoys, we can brand our province as a region of high quality agricultural produce.
However, it will again be proper that in this sector too, we brand our produce by the conditions and live-standards of those who work on the farms. The decent treatment they deserve. The deprivation that goes with life on the farms must be uncompromisingly combated. After all farmworkers are like all other workers, they only differ because they work on the farms.
The challenge we must address in all our strong economic sectors in Mpumalanga is the beneficiation of what we produce, from steel to wood, from beef to maize. In the next financial year we hope to set aside more funds for this purpose. They will exceed the R10 million budgeted for in the current financial year.
Madam Speaker, agriculture is one of the most important sectors in our province. But we are all aware of the historical difficulties of total exclusion we have inherited within three months the department will organise a workshop on establishing cooperatives.
As a start we are providing Agriculture starter packs made up of garden tools, fertilizer and seed to support 15 000 households who are beneficiaries of the emergency food supply. An amount of R4,8-million has been set aside for this project that is aimed at helping very needy families to produce their own food.
In the next three months we will implement Land Care projects. An amount of R5,5-million of grant money is available to implement 25 approved Land Care projects. Through this project we hope to ensure sustainable management of the natural environment and to create 1 088 temporary employment opportunities as part of the expanded Public Works Programme.
An amount of R38,2-million has been set aside for the Comprehensive Agriculture Support Programme (CASP) to provide for the development and rehabilitation of agricultural infrastructure. We will continue to give pre and post settlement support, particularly training the communities that have received land back on the proper use of the land.
We have budgeted more than R5.5million for land rehabilitation and we will continue playing a role in the promotion of commodity groups.
From July 1 we will be providing Primary clinical service for animals in the rural areas.
Through funding from the Development Bank of South Africa and the Job Creation Trust formed by the trade union federations Cosatu, Nactu and Fedhusa, we were able to assist in the establishment of the Greater Moutse Cotton Umbrella Project. This project will benefit more than 270 women farmers. Some of the project funds will be used to purchase tractors and other implements for the project. We hope to expand the project to other areas, funds permitting.
Madame Speaker and Honourable Members. We will also work on initiatives to reduce the costs of doing business in Mpumalanga and will promote specific industries and economic sectors. These initiatives are aimed at encouraging investment, economic growth and job creation. We will maintain the existing government-owned industrial infrastructure while we develop technoparks and incubators. We will evaluate and develop projects along the Maputo corridor.
As a matter of urgency there will be a review of the proper location of the Mpumalanga Parks Board whether is it properly placed under the institutional department of Agriculture.
Madame Speaker, everybody knows now that as far as tourism is concerned, Mpumalanga is sitting on a gold mine. This is true because the phenomenal growth we have witnessed over the last twenty-four months occurred in spite of the limited infrastructure we have. Our hospitality industry is not only lacking adequate facilities, but the average training of those employed by the industry is highly suspect. To this end, the newly-opened Tourism and Hospitality Academy will help reduce the common cutting of corners by our hoteliers and restaurateurs.
Madam Speaker, honourable members, what is most important is that we must educate the broad public of Mpumalanga about what it entails to be a thriving tourism region. To succeed we need to infuse the awareness that all of us, everywhere we are, regardless of whether we are doing business in tourism or not, we are collectively playing hosts to those who come to our province.
We all carry the duty to make those who come from outside of our province to have pleasant experiences to take back home with. With more and more visitors coming to see our heritage, we can then exploit fully the business opportunities they create for us.
In the next few months we will be holding a tourism workshop where we hope to deal in more detail with these matters.
As we spend more resources on attacking poverty, building economic infrastructure and creating work opportunities, we will take more and more young people through learnerships so they can gain skills and work experience in order for them to access jobs.
Our partners must help in the area of human resources development while addressing critical skills shortages in the economy. On Tuesday this week we commenced in earnest with our skills training of more than 50 of our public servants. In a fortnight the Department of Education will commence with the training of the first hundred unemployed people.
Madame Speaker, the Expanded Public Works Programme will be our key strategy to unlock the problem of joblessness in the province. The legacy of many policies of the apartheid order still lives with us today. It was by design that approximately 46 percent of the population of the province still live within the former homelands, on 10 percent of its surface without jobs, without land and with many infrastructural needs. The Expanded Public Works Programme will create work where the people are in order to simultaneously reverse the family dislocation revisited on our people by the culture of migrant labour.
In the rural areas children are abandoned by their desperate parents to grow by themselves without parental protection and guide. The Extended Public Works Programme will not only restore stability in many families, it will also mark the beginning of a long-term goal of providing the critical community infrastructure which must see us tackle the legendary struggle against rural oppression imposed by the urban-rural dichotomy. To expedite the work of the department in this regard, we will seek to urgently acquire the in-house technical expertise which was lost to consultants overtime. This has slowed down the speed of delivery and the costs thereof. In the next thirty days we will be holding a conference to put our ducks in a row, so to speak.
Madame Speaker, as often said, a nation that does not value its youth doesn't deserve its future. The province renews its pledge not to fail our young people. As government we will continue to honour our commitment to support all programmes and policies intended to benefit our youth.
In this respect, we shall endeavour to ensure that the resources availed to the Youth Commission are commensurate to the mandate it must discharge. In pursuit of the goal to provide our young people with opportunities to develop their talents to the full, we will strive to keep a healthy balance between promoting a spirit of entrepreneurship and encouraging the youth to pursue high academic and professional achievements in order to provide the country with the critcal skills-base it needs for it to advance and prosper. Professional life has not stopped to offer good life too.
We believe we are on track to meet the target set out in the Growth and Development Summit. We will, as a matter of urgency, put more energy, time and money on developing the telecommunications and energy sector while encourage more investment in key economic sectors such as manufacturing, information and communications technology, mining, crafts, tourism and cultural industries.
Before the end of July we will meet with our social partners to consolidate a common vision on the promotion of rising levels of growth, investment, job creation and people-centered development in the Province. This will culminate in a Provincial Economic Development and Investment Summit in September.
Before the end of June 2004 we will launch the Provincial Equity Fund, which is aimed at dealing with the challenge of access to finance. We will also strengthen the financial management and administration capacity of our Village Banks and the process of establishing co-operatives in the Province.
We will speed up the provision of housing, health-facilities, classrooms, water and sanitation, electricity and recruit and retain health personnel, improve infrastructure, enhance health promotion and nutrition, promote awareness on, and provide comprehensive care, management and treatment of HIV and AIDS.
We will spend more than R12, 047-million to improve the social infrastructure in our communities by building clinics, community gardens, information centres and small factories in the three districts including the two cross-border districts.
Ladies and gentlemen, the health of our people is a priority. That is why we aim to intensify our fight against HIV and AIDS, TB, malaria, diabetes, hypertension, malnutrition and other illnesses. But in order to do that we need to ensure that we have the proper infrastructure.
We will, as a matter of urgency, take an audit of all our Public Health Centre facilities to determine exactly what interventions we must make in order to improve the standards of service delivery at our Community Heath Centres and clinics. It is envisaged that this Audit will be finalised by the 31st of July 2004.
The first Comprehensive treatment and care for HIV and AIDS patients was rolled out on Tuesday this week at Witbank and Shongwe hospitals. The other four accredited facilities will roll out this programme by the end July 2004.
Ladies and gentlemen, the total budget for our HIV and AIDS programme for the year has increased to R68,4-million.
Let me also announce that we have started with the training of Community Health workers on the 59-day programme. This is critical in ensuring that the necessary capacity is available within communities for the health workers to render health promotion and provide essential care by visiting households in communities.
Over the next five years we will improve the functioning state of hospitals in the province, ensuring that they use modern business principles.
Our focus would be on empowering hospital management with appropriate skills to manage their facilities; ensure that our hospitals have the latest and most appropriate equipment and to ensure that they maintain a quality of service that is in line with what our people expect.
The hospitals we are targeting on the revitalisation drive are Rob Ferreira, Themba, Ermelo, Piet Retief, Bethal, Witbank, Standerton and Philadelphia.
Community Health Centre's and clinics to the value of R31-million will be constructed in the near future and accommodation at the various facilities to the value of R5,249 million will also be constructed.
Madame Speaker, Honourable members, the one level where we impact more strongly on communities as government, is at the local government level. As part of our celebrations of “10 years of freedom” all our municipalities will commence and complete within the next twelve months the process of renaming streets and other facilities in conjunction with the “Mpumalanga Geographical Names Committee”.
The Department of Local Government and Housing, in conjunction with the Department of Culture, Sports and Recreation, will immediately establish a task team for this purpose to help guide the process and advise municipalities.
Our province is littered with MAMPARA names that disgraces all the people of Mpumalanga, black and white. We must correct this negligence in order not to allow this relic of our shameful past to interfere with the consolidation of our new nationhood and values of our Constitution. We must totally free ourselves from the clutches of our conflictual past.
In the next three months we will construct 4115 houses in order to decently house our people. We hope to launch the Emalahleni Presidential Job Summit housing programme during the second week of July. By the end of July we would have handed over houses at Witbank, Uitvlugt in Groblersdal, Steenbok at Nkomazi and in the Govan Mbeki municipality. We will do this while ensuring that we complete our survey on “mud houses and shacks” by the end of July 2004.
Madam Speaker, we are also in the process of adopting by-laws relating to Credit Control and Debt Collection by the end of September 2004.
We are working all out to draft, pass and implement by-laws relating to Credit Control and Debt Collection in municipalities by the end of September 2004.
We will provide clean water to more that 99 000 people with a budget of R61,5 million. We will provide sanitation to more than 61 000-households and we hope to wipe-out the bucket-system by the end of March next year.
Let me confirm that the infrastructural needs of our schools are daunting. Many of our school are still short of classrooms, electricity and sanitation. Accurate data is being collected with the view to ascertain our budget shortfall in order to work out a funding strategy.
To improve our year-end results we will continue our winter school programmes in all regions while taking teachers from under-performing schools on refresher courses during the June holidays.
In order to deal with the problem of population migration, we are looking at the provision of moveable classrooms. In order to address the weaknesses in the school nutrition programme, we will tighten our monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. The department has employed officials in all three regions to do this task.
Madame Speaker, Honourable Members, we will ensure that all who are eligible for social grants, including poor children up to 14 years of age, receive these grants which increase at least at the rate of inflation.
On top of that we will fully integrate the institution of traditional leadership into democratic governance and development.
In order to protect our people from those who steal, maim and rob, we are glad to announce that there will be more visible policing through the recruitment, training and deployment of more police officers in our province.
We will increase our crime-scene response time through the purchasing of 379 new vehicles to the value of R39, 2 million.
An additional 848 officers will be employed by the end of 2004 to augment the 7152 police officer in the province.
We know we can do all these things and in the process creating more jobs, increase investments, empower those who in the past were excluded from the economy and develop the skills of our people.
We have no doubt that all these things are formidable challenges, however, the resilience of our people in struggle will always serve as an inspiration.
Madame Speaker, we have reason to celebrate. There are many reasons why our people are buoyant. Next year we will, as the province of the Mpumalanga, host the 2005 World Gold Panning Championships. We will do so while at the same time ensuring that preparations are in full-steam to showcase Nelspruit as one of the host cities of the 2010 World Cup.
Madame Speaker, in the our midst today is a true patriot, a tireless single-minded individual who at a great cost to his family comfort set out to achieve almost impossible mission and succeeded. In the process he has become a sophisticated campaigner and a shrewd strategist. The man who brought the World Cup home, a person who convinced the world that the “World Soccer Cup” was a misnomer and that Africa has indeed come of age.
Madame Speaker, allow me to ask the CEO of the 2010 World Cup Bid, Mr. DANNY JORDAAN to take a bow.
Madame Speaker, Honourable Members, we will intensify efforts aimed at building a spirit of community, good citizenship, social activism, moral regeneration and solidarity in all localities.
We will do this while improving interaction between government and the people through accountable public representatives, one-stop government centres, Izimbizo and the use of electronic government services.
Let all of us gathered here take back the message that tomorrow will be better than today if we all put shoulder to the wheel in building a prosperous province where all shall enjoy peace, security and comfort.
I thank you.