PREMIER'S ADDRESS
Master of Ceremonies
Distinguished delegates
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to be with you this evening.
If nothing else, this gives us the possibility to wish all the women a Happy Women's Day. But because ours is a non-sexist country, I would also wish all those men who respect and love their women a happy women's day.
Let me take this opportunity to call on all our men to join hands in the task of mobilising our women to unite in struggle for a better life for all our people – black and white.
The women's place is in the battle front of struggle. It must be our special task this year to organise our women folk into a powerful united and active force for revolutionary change.
Our struggle will be less that powerful and our national emancipation will never be complete if we continue to treat our women as dependent minors and objects of one form of exploitation or another.
Certainly no longer should it be that the women's place is in the kitchen. The women's place is in the struggle for a better life and the defence of our hard-earned democracy.
When we opened parliament earlier this year we announced certain programmes we intended implementing in our quest of working for a better life for all.
I am sure most of you in this house today are interested, like we are, in ensuring that our programmes get implemented. That they don't just remain good statements and good intentions but translate into the practical results that are intended.
Our view is that progress is being made with regard to the implementation of those programmes. One of the issues that we raised at the beginning of the year was a need to build the economy so that we can create jobs and alleviate poverty.
Our province is faced with a unique challenge: to grow our economy while consolidating our democracy within the context of an ever more open, more competitive world economy.
We are also faced with the task of creating jobs, meeting the basic needs of our people and empowering those who have been historically excluded from the economy.
I believe I am correct when I say we all see involvement in manufacturing and mining as a strategic imperative in the transformation of the South African economy.
It is therefore argued that if black business is to be an integral part of the economy, it must get involved in the actual business of making things. On the whole, black holding companies are gaining ownership and sometimes control of established corporations.
However black business is not gaining capacity at the operational level of corporate activity and particular hardcore business such as manufacturing.
In instances where black businesses have bought into productive corporations, their involvement tends be passive and the value they are expected to add is seen as external to the operations of the business itself. For an example, sectors which rely heavily on government tender, black partners are important to boost tender bids.
I am certain that many of us present here would be aware of a least some instances when black business people have been quite happy to lend their faces to white owners of Capital. So that the latter can appear to satisfy black empowerment requirements in government tenders.
We would also know of instances where black business people have behaved in a manner, which clearly says that they believe that the first charge on the corporate revenues is not the expansion of the business, and therefore the economy, but the acquisition of more personal wealth such as a grand house, a grand car and a grand salary.
Indeed, it is to meet this objective that some are ready to rent themselves out to white business people to win government tenders.
I am certain that all of us would agree that we would exclude such people from among those we would describe as activists for black economic empowerment.
For a while now debates about black economic empowerment and affirmative action have been placed in the public domain instead of being confined to boardrooms.
Together we must disarm those who seek to portray all black economic empowerment as a cosmetic attempt to dress up old apartheid structures of power and privilege by co-opting selected individuals.
We should join hands and ensure that it is viewed as a programme to genuinely empower millions who have previously been disempowered. Some have sought to project involvement of black business as relevant only in small business.
We are aware of the fact that in the recent past we have witnessed a spate of take-overs deals and launches of new companies by black entrepreneurs.
To the extent that this represents a challenge to the existing white monopolies, and a move into the direction of socially responsible business, the government is fully committed to such ventures.
We welcome it because we think it represents a move away from the traditional image and stereotype of black business being equated with only sectors like the taxi industry, shebeens, spaza shops and so on.
While these sectors remain important to our economy, I want to emphasise it unequivocally that I have no doubt that we are going to earn our respect in the mainstream economy by walking tall, by taking initiatives in ventures previously monopolised for the purposes of keeping all of us away from the means of production.
We must introduce into the economy a culture of shared wealth and equity. It will not happen by chance or some goodwill from those who have had a firm grip on the structures of economic control. The challenge for all of us is how to translate our profits into meaningful economic empowerment for the majority of people.
While it is wrong to say that only black business should engage in social responsibility, I think that what should distinguish us from the rest of business, is our social duty to the historically disempowered. Together we must take initiatives to empower all sections of our communities to start their business ventures.
It is us who must show even those already established in the economic mainstream that we are committed to labour standards and basic rights of working people.
We must become the pioneers of new relationships in the workplace.
Our responsibility lies with the full understanding that we have urban and rural poverty,and that such social problems should be tackled by all of us as a patriotic partnership against socio-economic maladies.
We therefore have a responsibility to create a viable social sector, a sector that is the engine of our economic transformation agenda, genuine manifestation of the longed-for dream of economic independence.
Together we can make such objectives a reality.
For as long as there is abject poverty and the majority of people still eke a living in the dumps of our province, our ventures will always be relevant.
For as long as the means of robust economic performance remain in the hands of a few that have always had them, our task remains more relevant than ever. It is us who must give economic growth a developmental meaning.
A meaning that says, there is no growth if the fruits of a blossoming economy are enjoyed by a few and the rest become slaves to the advancement of the already wealthy.
It is us who have known poverty who can give economy such a moral culture; a culture of people-centredness; a culture that says we are not empowered if the majority still worry about just getting a job.
As President Mbeki said, we will always have sleepless nights if the majority are still bondage to humiliating poverty, and their existence has been reduced to television images of hungry children in the hands of their famished and lifeless mothers.
And their existence has been reduced to television images of hungry children in the hands of their famished and lifeless mothers.
I thank you.