ADDRESS BY MPUMALANGA DIRECTOR-GENERAL DR COLEMAN NYATHI
Master of Ceremonies
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen.
It is a great honour to have been invited to visit your country and I am humbled by the wonderful way in which I was received today.
I have been to Mozambique several times before, but not on official business and only for the briefest visits. So I will always cherish this day your beautiful country and the warmth of the people of Mozambique.
I bring you greetings from the people of Mpumalanga, especially from Premier Ndaweni Mahlangu who cannot be with us today. He would have loved to have been here today. As I speak to you He is away in Johannesburg on party business.
The people of South Africa attach great importance to our political and economic relations with Mozambique, particularly with the Gaza province. Our visit has brought a welcome opportunity to discuss relations between our two countries.
Through the dark years of apartheid, the Mozambican people were an indispensable part of the worldwide support for our struggle for freedom and democracy. For many South African exiles, you provided a home from home.
For many of our political prisoners the name of Mozambique became indelibly linked with the attainment of their freedom. Many of your countrymen lost their lives deep in the bowels of our country's soil searching for gold or coal.
The freedom we won with your help has brought new challenges. We are tackling them with confidence, safe in the knowledge that we have the support of our good friends, including Mozambique.
We are grateful for the high priority which your government accords to relation with democratic South Africa. Your support has helped us entrench democracy and confront our past so that we can heal our nation and reconcile ourselves for a bright future.
As we take our first few steps into the new millennium, the countries of the developing and developed world need to move closer together if we are to overcome the challenges facing the world. Southern African partnership for peace and prosperity. The growing all-round links between our two countries contribute to its realisation.
We are assembled to celebrate the selfless contributions of a leader, a patriot an internationalist and a mother. Indeed it is the combination of all these qualities so splendidly in one individual, which made Mama Graca Machel the great African she is was.
Men and women of rare qualities are few and hard to come by.
Today, as two nations celebrate a life the richness of which touched the hearts of millions and made an indelible mark on the history of our country; we do so as proud Mozambicans, South Africans and Africans.
When future generations look back at what has been achieved in bringing much needed relief to starving children the world over, they will be justified in saying: Mama Graca was central in making it happen.
When those children start enjoying a life as adults they will be right in saying Mama Graca helped lay the foundation for a better life. Such is the life we celebrate today. A life not so much of generosity to the needy by a Mozambican woman, for Mama Graca does not see herself as Mozambican, but as African.
If we have taken liberty to claim Mama Graca as ours today, this merely underlines that there are those to whom she was more than just a revolutionary and a friend.
Master of Ceremonies, the fact that we are gathered here today as Mozambicans and as South Africans bears testimony to the intertwined destiny of our people and our countries.
Today is actually a meeting of old friends. And a meeting of old friends and partners in struggle is always pleasurable. But we are here not only to celebrate but also to assert the high premium we place on relations with our neighbours. Only a short time has passed since the yoke of apartheid was lifted from my own country; since its shadow was lifted from Mozambique and from our Southern African region as a whole.
The progress we have since made in forging a new relationship may only represent the first steps. But they already bring tangible vindication of the noble vision of a peaceful and prosperous region, bound by relations of co-operation and mutual respect, which guided our peoples through decades of costly struggle.
As a people whose freedom owes much to Mozambique, we are proud that we have been able to assist your own peace process, including both development aid and assistance in the running of your elections last year.
It is a sad reality, but in the nature of things in a region which has suffered so long a period of destabilisation, that the matters on which we have had urgently to work together include weapons smuggling, stock theft, drug trafficking and other crimes, as well as resultant population movements.
Nonetheless, the closeness of our cooperation in these fields testifies to the interest we share in peace and security. However, co-operation in such matters as road and air transport, shipping, health and electricity supply speak of the shared economic interests of neighbours at last free from the destructive constraints of civil strife.
The Maputo Corridor illustrates our commitment to ventures which will contribute to the economic development and integration of the Southern African region as a whole.
Ultimately, prosperity and peace between any two neighbouring countries in Southern Africa must depend on political stability and prosperity within the region as a whole.
The South African Government is strongly committed to promoting policies which secure these ends. The Premier has told me that we shall not operate in isolation without due recognition of our neighbours' interests.
We cannot do otherwise. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the steadfast and self-sacrificing support we enjoyed from you and your people in time of war.
If we do otherwise we would be denying the tenacity with which you have pursued a path which has helped take us all towards peace and security in Southern Africa.
Master of ceremonies, I believe the ongoing programmes in your community are part of a bi- national effort towards the development of our countries through partnerships between our governments, between government and the people, between government and the private sector, for the benefit of all our people, especially the poor and the marginalised.
While much has been done and we are on the right road in creating a better life for all, there is a great deal that we must all still do together.
The challenge now for members of the King's Foundation, the Foundation for Community Development and Khani Mambo is how to accelerate our work in improving infrastructure and service delivery and thus creating an enabling environment for the improvement of our people's lives.
The challenge to the people, the citizens of this part of your country, is how to strengthen the partnership between government and the people by actively participating in all aspects of community life.
Only with full and active participation by the community, can we have an involved community and an empowered community, one that is not afraid to voice their concerns and articulate their needs, a community that has a say in the formulation and implementation of goals.
Only through community representation and even co-ownership of projects, can we have a future in which all our people become conscious of their skills and fully self-confident of their actions and their abilities to work towards a better life.
Only through community involvement in all matters concerning them can we truly improve the quality of life. Then, in this way, we shall see creative power of the community at work, creating a better society for us all. We shall the see change at a local level impacting on the province and the entire country, bringing into being the caring nation we speak so much about.
Only with partnerships between the people and their government, only with interactions of mutual benefit between people and the private sector, can we as communities and as a people prosper.
When we speak about making the next century an African century, let us remember that change for the better first occurs at local level. Your efforts can impact on a national reality and at international levels and transform the face of local governance even on a continental level. There is a Latin saying which reads: “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi!” Something new always comes out of Africa
At the beginning of the 16th century, Leo Africanus, a Spaniard resident in Morocco, visited West Africa and wrote the following about the roy al court in Timbuktu, Mali:
“The rich king of Timbuktu ... keeps a magnificent and well-furnished court ... Here are great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king's cost and charges. And hither are brought diverse manuscripts or written books out of Barbarie, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise.”
I tell you these things, Chairperson, to indicate to us that those who consider Africa as backward and barbaric need to rethink.
We have said that we must, through our own efforts as Africans, make the 21 st Century an African Century.
We have also said that as from next year, the Year 2001, we should ourselves as a Continent, launch the African Century and therefore observe that year as the Year for the Beginning of the African Century. The people of Africa, including our own, continue to be immersed in poverty.
Millions of Africans continue to lose their lives as a result of preventable diseases, including AIDS.
Millions of families cannot feed themselves because they have no jobs, no land they can till and what they produce and sell cannot guarantee them a decent standard of living.
Millions have no possibility to live in conditions of freedom because we continue to allow tyrannical regimes to impose themselves on us, especially those that carry guns.
We have permitted some among us, as during our struggles for liberation, to become part of the problem of the continuing suffering of the masses of our people rather than being part of the solution, thus further complicating our possibility to advance.
Millions cannot live in conditions of safety and security because we give the opportunity to some to impose wars on us, deny us the possibility to solve our problems by peaceful means, and thrive as criminals who murder, rob and rape.
We have allowed big-time robbers to enrich themselves by corrupt means and at the expense of millions of people who were already poor.
We have given space to those who do not care for the fundamental aspirations of the people, to divide the people and divert them from their real and common interests, by driving them to racism, narrow nationalism, tribalism, ethnicity, regionalism and religious fanaticism.
We have accepted the creation of conditions as a result of which some of the best African brains have left our Continent, choosing to settle in countries outside Africa which were already more advanced than we are.
We the Africans, who led the ancient world in science, technology, intellectual activity and the arts, have stood by as the rest of the world moved forward while we regressed towards becoming a historical curiosity.
Whereas as a Continent we gave birth to all humanity, we are today seen as the least advanced of all human societies anywhere in the world.
For a millennium, including the passing century, we have failed to destroy the insulting and criminal prejudice which has described the black human complexion as the very representation of everything that is sub-human within the human race.
We have not yet broken the feeling of defeat, surrender and lack of initiative among some black people, which leads them to believe that, indeed, they are not equal to other people who, though as human as they are, are nevertheless of a different colour.
Much work remains to be done to ensure the emancipation of the women of Africa. We could never say we have realised the objectives of the African Century if we do not achieve this goal, which is a central element of the renewal of our Continent.
Recently I came across this passage from a book called "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa" written by Keith B. Richburg.
"I am an American, but a black man, a descendant of slaves brought from Africa... If things had been different, I might have been one of them (the Africans) -- or might have met some... anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage (to slavery).
“Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I'll throw it back into your face, and then I'll rub your nose in the images of the rotting flesh (of the victims of the genocide of the Tutsis or Rwanda)... Sorry, but I've been there. I've had an AK-47 (automatic rifle) rammed up my nose, I've talked to machete-wielding Hutu militiamen with the blood of their latest victims splattered across their T-shirts.
“I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire, a famine in Somalia, a civil war in Liberia. I've seen cities bombed to near rubble, and other cities reduced to rubble, because their leaders let them rot and decay while they spirited away billions of dollars -- yes, billions -- into overseas bank accounts ... Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.' And this time, in the place of the Roman child, it is the American child who will not hesitate to go to bed when he or she is told, “The Africans are coming! The barbarians are coming!”
Chairperson, the above passage clearly illustrates that we have not travelled very far with regard to the projection of frightening images of savagery that attend the continent of Africa.
How then, you may ask, can we speak of an African century when we still have such frightening images coming out of Africa. The first thing we must do, clearly, is to turn all that negativity about Africa around. And I know we will succeed.
We must succeed to strengthen and further entrench democracy in our country and inculcate a culture of human rights among all our people, which is, indeed, happening.
We must succeed to rebuild and reconstruct our economies, achieve high and sustained rates of growth, reduce unemployment, and provide a better life for the people, a path on which we have embarked.
We must succeed to meet the needs of the people so as to end poverty and improve the quality of life by ensuring access to good education, adequate health care, decent homes, clean water and modern sanitation, and so on, again a process on which we have embarked.
We must take decisive steps to challenge the spread of HIV/AIDS, of which Africa accounts for two-thirds of the world total of those infected. The Mpumalanga government has taken the necessary decisions directed at launching and sustaining a big campaign to confront this scourge.
We must discharge our responsibilities to ourselves, future generations and the world with regard to the protection of the environment, cooperating with all nations to meet what is, after all, a common challenge.
We must therefore organise ourselves to mount that challenge of historic importance to the evolution of human civilisation.
Clear, any among us who is preoccupied with denying his or her people their democratic and human rights, who is fixated on waging wars against others, who is too busy looting the public coffers or who thinks that he or she must bow in supplication for charity to those whose wealth sets them aside as the mighty, will not have the time to participate in meeting this historic challenge.
During the apartheid years you bore the wrath of its powerful neighbour angered by the successes of the approaching democratic order.
Now that the countries in the region are finally rid of the cruel and crippling destablisation of the previous South African regime, we can turn our full attention to the task of developing the region and placing it firmly in its rightful place amongst the nations of the world.
We are encouraged by this while realising that much more still needs to be done. The challenges facing us are different from those facing our forefathers.
Hunger, starvation, illiteracy and unemployment may not seem as powerful as the enemies of the past but we know that they are equally destructive and just as painful to our people.
In order to better the lives of the people of Southern Africa we are committed to redoubling our efforts at economic integration and co-operation for development.
As a region we shall vigorously defend the peace and stability that we have all worked so hard to achieve' we shall strive to find creative ways to invite investment, boost trade and advance manufacturing.
While we preserve and revere our traditions we shall use our centuries-old experience to benefit our peoples; so that our peoples have access to the resources, education and technology that we need for success in the new age.
Let us join hands to ensure that as we enter the new millennium, the political rights that the twentieth century has recognised, and the independence that nations have gained, shall be translated into peace, prosperity and equity for all.
The celebrations here today reaffirms for us the continuity between heroic tradition and renewal for the sake of the betterment of our people. We are confident that the FDC, the King's Foundation, Khani Mambo and the people of Mozambique and South Africa will rise to meet these challenges with wisdom.
KHANI MAMBO