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Ladies and Gentlemen,

This weekend, I spent some time in Amsterdam - a small rural town in Mpumalanga Province - where I was involved in a voter registration campaign. I was remarkable to be welcomed by the South African Police Services. This would certainly not have been the case before 1994 when we would arrive as union organisers recruiting workers into Cosatu.

Travelling to the township set starkly across the surrounding mountains, one experienced the hardships yet the humility and determination of rural life. The sounds of mournful singing drew our attention to the local graveyard adjacent to the voter registration station. They were burying a young woman, Tomfikile Mthembu. She had been killed in a tragic taxi accident. She was unemployed, travelling to Johannesburg to buy goods to resell in her home town. Now her life has been extinguished by the carelessness and neglect of a taxi driver. She had been a volunteer in the ranks of the ANC, urging our people and especially the youth to register and exercise their right to vote in the next democratic election. Tomfikile is a statistic now. She could have had opportunities that developed her human potential.

As we celebrate this evening, let us commit ourselves to ensuring that skills development gives a better life to our youth. As we stand at the dawn of the next thousand years, we are in the throes of a global information revolution. The future is about knowledge. It is about intelligence. It is about skills development. My hope is that those who have benefited from this exchange programme will extend the same opportunity to many others. This would be a filling memory to Ms Tomfikile Mthembu.

We have just celebrated the arrival of a new year, and every new year, people spend time contemplating the past 12 months and reflecting on what's going to happen in the year ahead. This year, this trend was more tangible because we began reflecting on the achievements of mankind over the past Millennium, and speculating what the next Millennium holds for us, individually and as a nation, as humanity.

This reflection is not only about tangible but also our spiritual and emotional achievements. Because what does it matter that we have made it possible for men to live and work in space, if two thirds of humanity have no greater peace, joy or hope?

How can we celebrate Alexander Graham Bell's magnificent invention of the telephone and all the advances its brings with it - digital communications, computers, the Internet - when half of humanity has not seen a telephone or does not have access to a telephone? That is something we have to contemplate as we reflect on the advances of our civilisation over the past Millennium.

Modernisation has ensured that we live longer, that we are better educated, that we have better health, that we have access to better services that make our lives more comfortable, that we live in a global village that is borderless.

But the reality is that there are new boundaries that are emerging. These are the boundaries between the North and the South, between the urban and rural, between the information rich and the information poor, between men and women and white and black.

We have to examine the underpinnings and the values of modernisation. Is it just driven by just greed and avarice, and the need of certain sections of our society internationally to just accumulate power for the sake of power? To devastate societies irrespective of the consequences?

Our future generations seek the hope of a better world. We need to restore the balance in our lives as we harness the power of the most modern technology to catapult all the citizens of the world into the 21st Century.

So, then what are the challenges that face us in building this global Internet economy?

One is a question of delivering universal service and universal access. How do we ensure that these services are available to all across the globe? How do we ensure that this knowledge economy is not something that just concentrates power in the hands of those that are affluent and those that have access currently? How do we connect every village, every school, every clinic, every library and every community centre to this global village?

In South Africa, we are pioneering the new forms of public private sector partnerships that balance the imperative of investors wanting a return on their investment with our developmental priorities of education, health, security and access to government services.

When we restructured our telecommunications sector, we privatised a large part of our national operator Telkom, but we took one billion rand and put it back into the enterprise in order to kick-start building a modern communications infrastructure. We got the commitment of our partners to connect every school, every village, every community centre, every police station, every clinic, etc. We got a commitment that they would build a digital, fibre optic, broadband high-speed backbone that would build the Internet economy and promote electronic commerce.

But it can also deliver tele-medicine and tele-education. We were also able to create a fund for the Universal Service Agency whose job it is to make sure that universal service and universal access constantly remains on the agenda. We define universal service as more than just voice, and want to take the Internet to the remotest rural village so that the women who live there begin to use it in applications such as tele-agriculture so they can begin to examine the market place and the prices they can get for the food they are growing on their land.

In Africa, one of the greatest challenges we have to face, and one of the questions we have to answer in a conference like this, is that the penetration of telephones on the African continent - with more than 700 million people - is less than 0,5%. There are only 14 million telephones in Africa, less than you would find in New York or Tokyo.

If we say that the greatest human development challenge of the 21 Century is plugging Africa into that information revolution, then how do we manage this process, this transition, to ensure that the majority of the world's population are part of this progress and are not continuing to be isolated and marginalised?

Poverty, devastation and instability will reach deep into the hearts of the developed countries unless we are able to develop the kind of partnerships that say these are our problem and we need to find joint solutions to those problems.

We must ensure that the content of the Internet does not just reflect the values that emanate from the developed North, but that also reflect the richness of our traditions, our languages and our views of life?

Building trust between the developed and developing world represents one of our greatest challenges. We need to broaden the values that underpin the current modernisation. It must be one of honesty, integrity, compassion and humility. We need to accept that everyone in the world has a right to communication, everyone in the world has a right to the education and skills that help construct the new knowledge economies of the world.

And if we can do this then I believe that the benefits of digital revolution is something we can be proud of, that is taking a giant leap forward for humanity.

Thank you
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