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Director of Ceremonies, Dr Klaaste, Editor-in-Chief of the Sowetan,
Representatives of the Sponsors, MEC Mary Metcalfe, Parents,
Principals and Educators, Learners, Ladies and Gentlemen

Parliament is, today and tomorrow, discussing the budget. I should have been there, particularly given the structural and material backlogs we inherited from apartheid education and are single-mindedly addressing. But what is money without people? What is a budget without people? If you had the kind of budget you wanted but no people, what would you achieve?

Director of ceremonies, I am not talking about people in terms of their presence, their existence. I am talking about people as living beings, as actors, as doers. I am talking about people as in the people without whose vision, commitment and dedication to tangible social upliftment we would not have been here today. It is to these people that I felt I just had to pay tribute by shelving my parliamentary responsibility for today. I am speaking of people like Dr Aggrey Klaaste who, right under the smelly nose of apartheid, set in motion a social regeneration programme called Nation-building.

I believe we are gathered here today under the auspices of that programme. My presence here today is meant to acknowledge my Ministry's, and indeed the government's, recognition of this selfless programme of rebuilding the social fabric of this country, this beautiful land which was for years raped by a system of banditry and brigandage. We take off our hats to this programme and all those involved in it.

Present-day South Africa is peopled by two kinds of people; armchair critics and active transformers. Sadly, the former are in the majority and tend to dwarf the latter in terms of recognition. Sections of our media are in no small measure responsible for this. It is against this background that one must single the Sowetan out for its robust but objective analysis of social transformation in this country and its proactive engagement if efforts to ameliorate the plight of the socially destitute. This paper's nation-building projects affirms the need for all sectors of our society to make a concrete contribution to the material healing of this nation's human resources. As the famous pop, or is to disco, or perhaps rhythm and blues, song goes: We are all in this thing together; we've got to work it out.

Business has also taken up the challenge. It is heartening indeed to see an increasing number of business people ploughing some of their profits back to their origins.

Liberty Life, Johnnic and New Africa Investments Limited must be thanked for joining the government in the reconstruction and development process of the country.

We have consistently said government cannot hope to transform the material conditions of this country's people without the material support of business. It is this context which informs our refrain for a government-business partnership. I must express my gratitude to the Gauteng Education MEC for giving concrete expression to this belief by her presence here and active involvement in other projects of material collaboration between business and the government.

What can be more material than the textbooks we so desperately need to arm our learners? It gives me great pleasure indeed to be part of a ceremony where these important learning resources are presented to the children of South Africa. The gift of a book is a gift beyond the material. It is a gift with transformative possibilities far beyond the obvious. A book builds a person in ways that very few of us generally think of.

Let us be reminded, however, that just as money cannot, on its own, achieve anything, so are books nothing without the human element. I am here thinking of the educators and the learners.

At the end of the day it is these human elements who are going to determine the real significance of this occasion and the force of books in this our developing democracy.

Are our educators, for example, harnessing the mind-enriching potential of books by practising the pedagogy of questioning and critical reading? And do our learners give their textbooks the respect they deserve?

I am asking these questions because if we truly and fully respected books, today's gracious donation would in fact be divided into two, perhaps three. There are many books which government has , over the years, provided to schools but which can today not be accounted for. Some of our learners, quite unconcerned about the brothers and sisters following on their footsteps, quite often do not return textbooks handed out to them. Some of our educators must accept responsibility for this disturbing state of affairs. They abet this practice by not taking the necessary disciplinary action against transgressors. The result is a situation where we may continually be pouring money into a bottomless pit. A more professional and ethical administration of our book stock is obviously necessary for a sustainable campaign to secure the sponsorship of books from the business fraternity. Business, as we all know, does not believe in an investment which is shoddily managed and therefore without returns.

Let's give each book the minimum five-year circulation that it should enjoy. This is particularly necessary now that we have introduced an outcomes-based system of education. A critical element of this empowering approach is learner interaction with material.

Textbooks are therefore a crucial element in the development of interrogative faculties in our learners. A book is potentially an ever-present fellow learner and teacher. This is what our Curriculum 2005 intends to reinforce.

A person of no less a position than the President himself has made a pledge to the nation. He has emphatically promised that no school shall, come opening time next year, be without the necessary stationery and learning materials. Some think he has committed his party of the government. I say he has committed us all. I think he has galvanised this nation to action. Education is a national responsibility. The point I am making is that the safeguarding of the books we are, as a nation, being provided with today is a responsibility which extends to even the parents at the homes of the recipients of these books.

This is another responsibility in the long list which we have to deal with in our ongoing quest for a culture of learning, teaching and service.

What is a school-stamped textbook still doing at home long after the person it was handed to has exited the school system? Is granny or grandpa reading it during the day? It is about time that we finally became fully responsible for our assets. Books are assets whose value cannot be measured against money.

To wit, the most successful countries in the world have above average numbers where libraries are concerned. As a developing economy, we need books far more than most of us know.

I may be giving the impression that I am more concerned about the conservation of books than about their use. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have only been emphasising the fact that you cannot use what you do not have. I will therefore now turn to the use of these books.

In this regard I have already indicated that our curriculum is a learner-centred one. It is based on the principle of learner involvement not as a tabula rasa but as a key participant in his or her own intellectual development. In this scheme of things the rote learning of bantu education and the regurgitation of whole chapters of textbooks is a cardinal sin because it causes mental damage to the learner. The textbook is meant to trigger thinking and to jog the mind.

But this needs to be facilitated by a teacher who understands the centrality of the human input and who raises the right questions. We are here speaking about the triangle of the teacher, the learner and the learning material we call a book.

It is this triangle on whose shoulder we place the future of this nation. It is therefore a triangle which needs our collective support. I understand today's ceremony as our vote of support for the human resource development of our country, for a country which does not invest in its own people has no future.

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