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Honoured Guests
Members of the Executive Council
Mayors of Local Municipalities and District Council Mayors
Project and Programme managers
Ladies and Gentlemen

At about the time of the founding of the town Kimberley, the preoccupation with exploiting the riches of the land, coupled with a now suspected deliberate racial bias in the policies of the Government of the day, meant that scant attention was paid to the proper planning of infrastructure of the towns that became hosts to the thousands of wealth seekers who flocked to the diamond fields of South Africa.

The human habitation and infrastructure situation that developed around the mineral deposits and similar settlements were chaotic as far as the foreign wealth seekers was concerned. I it was far worse for the indigenous communities of who became indentured to the mineral fields.

The indigenous communities were at times forcibly removed from the communal lands that supported their lifestyles and that of whole communities. The very basis of their common subsistence was methodically erased and harassed and hamstrung by successive regimes.

In order to ensure a continued flow of cheap and reliable labour to the emerging diamond mines, among others, the Governments of the day, sometimes acting in blatant collusion with the similarly emerging diamond and mineral mining houses, deprived the indigenous people of land by legislating against their land titles.

The mining houses in their turn constructed huge holding pens in which they housed the many displaced and unwilling mine labourers. The design and layout of these labour camps left it in no doubt that what was actually being administered by the mining houses were proper labour concentration camps.

The labour camps often had barbed wire spanned around their perimeter to discourage any break out of those who were forcibly held inside them. It is a matter of record that the cramped up quarters of the labourers, the less than adequate diet, unregulated or almost non-existent ablution facilities, the complete absence of medical care as well as the labourers' frequent intermingling and proximity to foreigners exposed them to the elements as well as human borne maladies. Many a labourer perished in those camps.

That situation by and large remained unchanged for close to a century. Separate Development as a policy of an earlier Government came along and merely perfected the deliberate neglect of the labour compounds.

The deliberate lack of infrastructure planning was so rampant and such a widely accepted norm of the South Africa of old that hardly a town exist today that does not have what was in subsequent years termed a "black labour reserve" by former regimes.

The likes of Galeshewe near the present day Kimberley developed from these abominable conditions. Galeshewe and other labour reserves grew into large urban settlements in gross violation of the wishes of the Governing classes of the day.

Thankfully, We are today presiding over the unravelling of huge elements of that system of Government orchestrated neglect of infrastructure development.

The Northern Cape Provincial Administration's "Bucket Eradication Programme" is a concerted effort to tackle a centuries old infrastructure backlog.

It is pursuit of, among others, eradicating these labour reserves and as well as the haphazard town planning that went with them that we have as one of our major town re-organisation programmes the Consolidated Municipal Infrastructure Programme (CMIP), the Urban and Rural Renewal Programme as well as this programme which we are officially launching today.

We have spread the Bucket Eradication programme over three years and have allocated R90m to it through the department of Local Government and Housing budget. We aim to eradicate over twenty one thousand buckets by June 2004. This programme will run concurrently with the CMIP programme in the Francis Baard, Namakwa, Siyanda, Karoo and Kgalagadi municipalities. It will to a large extend also complement the Galeshewe Urban Renewal Programme as well as the Kgalagadi Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme. (ISRD)

This programme will at its completion ensure the sustained supply of an appropriate sanitation system as well as piped water to many disadvantaged people of the Northern Cape. It would bring to a close one of the major objectives of this Government namely that of bringing about change as well as a better life to all spheres of our communal living.

More especially, programmes such as these will go a long towards restoring the dignity of our people who have been made and at times forced to live in absolute squalor.

I thank the local and district councils and municipalities for their cooperation in these projects. For its is through their good offices that must if not all of these project's would be executed. They would also provide the necessary technical expertise as well as play a supervisory and maintenance role once the systems have been installed.

I thank all the project leaders and coal face workers who have and will still spend endless hours in the planning and execution of this programme.

Thank you.
Ke a Leboga.
Dankie.

Issued by Office of the Premier, Northern Cape

29 April 2003

(Source: Northern Cape Provincial Government (http://www.northern-cape.gov.za)