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It gives me great pleasure to take this opportunity to foster my dialogue with the press in South Africa. As you know, I have often been at odds with the press but I have always respected the role that you play in our democracy. I think that this role is becoming increasingly more important. I have the feeling that the election campaign has somehow already begun, and that we are going to have a long and complex electoral period. The next elections are in fact, going to be special for our country, if not destiny-determining. Most of the elections we have had in the past, have not determined the policies of the Government that was empowered through them. Not only their resolve was a foregone conclusion but also they did not give to the government a clear message of what the people expected to be done.

I think that it is essential for South Africa that at the next elections voters make their voices heard and pronounce a clear message about what they wish their future to be. The next elections should be a time in which voters' exercise, not only their right, but also their duty to choose. If our democracy is to survive, we cannot continue to have elections in which voters are moved and motivated by allegiance rather than opinion and feel obliged to vote for the ruling party because they are the ruling party, whether or not they approve how the ruling party has thus far ruled. For this reason, I feel that the press has a fundamental role to play in educating our voters to exercise their democratic duty to turn the next election into the time in which the people hold Government accountable. The next election should be the report card of our Government and should express whether our people wish to have five more years of the same, or are they willing to demand something better. In the past nine years we have achieved enormously, but there are outstanding issues on which the electorate must express its view.

However, for this exercise and democracy to succeed, it is necessary that a much deeper understanding of issues becomes available to the overwhelming majority of our voters. In fact, voters are thirsty for knowledge and information but not enough is forthcoming from the press. At times, I feel that the press only sees its role as that of reporting what politicians say. Nonetheless, what I have to say often does not get reported. I have often said that we can rightly be proud of what we have achieved in the past nine years. However, there are outstanding issues. All South Africans are directly or indirectly affected by, unemployment, insufficient economic growth, HIV/AIDS, crime, poverty in rural areas and corruption. These are the issues, which affect all of us on a daily basis and on which the success of our country and the survival of our democracy really hang.

These are also the issues, which have remained neglected in spite of many past successes. Because these issues are so great one must accept that no matter how much we have achieved in other respects, enough was not done to deal with them and often their importance, if not their existence, has been denied. There has been almost a tendency of not wanting these issues to be fully debated and their magnitude exposed, as if by not talking about them they may go away. In fact, they are not going away and by not talking about them, we are limiting our capacity of finding the most suitable options and strategies to address them and our possibilities of mastering the necessary political will to tackle them. Indeed, there is a crisis of political will whenever any such issues are raised.

I wish to repeat these issues because, as I am focusing my own attention on them, so we need to ensure that our country indeed will be duly focused on their implications. The issues, which affect all of us, are unemployment, HIV/AIDS, crime, insufficient economic growth, corruption, and poverty in underdeveloped rural areas. In respect of each of such issues we must ask ourselves what may be done, what ought to be done and what is not being done, and why. It is the role of the press to ask these questions and help them emerge in the public debate. It is also our collective role to determine what is the relevance of these questions in the shaping of future politics and what I, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, have to do myself and with my party in the next five years. Today, during my address to you, I will try to tackle these questions and tease out some of the possible answers.

To me the key issue is that of mastering the necessary political will to identify and implement solutions to problems, snapping out of the syndrome of denial, which has often clouded policy-making irrespective of these issues. We must accept that crime is out of control and that the rule of law is disintegrating. There are standard solutions to deal with these problems. We need more policemen who are better paid, better trained and provided with much greater resources. We also need more judges with greater training and more courtrooms and clerical support. Obviously, crime cannot be fought only through repression. We need a massive campaign of education and moral regeneration within all our communities to enable people to break away from the culture of crime. Crime is an abstraction and as such, it does not exist in reality. What exist are many South Africans who engage often in criminal conduct. We need to work also on the heart and minds promoting civic education, not only in our schools, but also in our workplaces, families and communities. We are still far from having consolidated the importance of the rule of law in the hearts and minds of our people.

Obviously, the problems of crime are closely connected with those of unemployment. However, unemployment has also not been tackled with the required policy energy. There has been a great deal of discussion, conferences and summits about unemployment, but a much lesser degree of tangible actions. For too long there has not been sufficient acknowledgement of the hundreds of thousands of job positions, which have been lost since 1994. Unless we reverse this trend all the gains of our democracy stand to be lost. I have made many proposals to create employment both in the short and the long term and many other people and leaders have done the same. I have mentioned that in the short term we need to have a country-wide reform to support the transformation of our agriculture from land intensive, low added value and not labour intensive crops, which are prevailing in our country, to labour intensive, high added value and non land intensive produce such as nuts, grapes, spices, fruits, flowers etc. Obviously, reform of this nature would need to be supported by Government, both in terms of assisting on the production side through cooperatives, as well as in marketing products not only domestically, but also internationally, by branding South Africa as a quality agricultural producer.

No short term plan for employment generation and economic growth will succeed unless we have a long term plan on how our country is going to succeed in the global market. We need to know now what we will be producing for the global markets in twenty-five years. We must make investments now to develop the relevant industry. Otherwise, our domestic markets are going to be increasingly supplied by foreign products produced by people employed abroad without us having products to offer on the global market produced here in the fashion that employs our people and provides them with the means for a free and dignified life. Whether we like it or not, this long term vision does not exist. Yet this vision is essential and can only be forged on the basis of a broad-based national compact that brings all major stakeholders to join hands together. For this reason, it is essential that we overcome the present politics of division and that we create the basis for the politics of unity and of a national alliance for development, development and development.

These are important and very real issues on the basis of which the performance and delivery of any government are to be assessed. Every government does something about what needs to be done. However, the success or failure of any given government is to be assessed, not in terms of whether something did, but whether it did the full measure of what it could have done, and what was required under the circumstances. We have economic growth but there is no doubt that the growth we have is insufficient. Our economy is stagnant. Our industries are not growing and new industries are not emerging. We must ask ourselves whether everything, which could have been done to stimulate economic growth, is indeed being done or whether we should not hope for the next election to send out a very loud and clear message that much more needs to be done in the future. Stimulating economic growth is neither easy nor painless. In fact, it is hard and painful. However, it is one of those cases in which there is no cure without pain.

Our Government committed itself to good policies such as privatisation, liberalisation of market forces, flexibility in the labour market, breakdown of cartels and monopolies, incentives to small and medium businesses and the breakdown of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers. By adopting these policies, Government recognised the need of walking an uphill and possibly painful path towards success. But after having taken a few steps in that direction, it stopped and sat on its hands without doing anything. The opposition of Cosatu to many of these policies and its repeated threats of rolling mass action and general strikes have unduly paralysed initiative and progress. Nonetheless, the declarations of what had to be done markers the measure of our failures. As I have urged since 1991, privatisation should have taken place years ago and should have been finalized on the basis of economic, rather than political considerations and policies. Long ago, our country should have been open to international competition, which, undoubtedly, might have caused some shrinkage in our economy. However, this would have forced our industry to have become world competitive. Instead, in many fields such as communications and banking we have chosen the route of protectionism, which has taken the pain away in the short term but will cause major setbacks in the long term.

The issue of the flexibility of the labour market is also a good example. As you will remember, in 1999 a complete overhaul of our labour legislation was announced together with efforts to regenerate the moral fibre of our communities. Not much has been done about either. I am particularly concerned about our young people who, because of lack of flexibility in the labour market, cannot find jobs for which they are qualified, even though they are often smarter, better qualified and more skilled than those who hold the positions to which they aspire. It is part of our South African tragedy that many people were employed beyond their capacities, skills and God given talents, because of the ongoing process of transformation aimed at eradicating the legacy of apartheid. I fully understand and justify that this had to happen, but we should not for that reason, deny that it did happen and understand its consequences on our labour dynamics and our national productivity. There is a second wave of people who require to be empowered that has grown through the ranks of our universities and training centres being free of the psychological and material shackles of apartheid and racial oppression. This second wave has the rightful aspiration of pushing out the first wave and taking their jobs, which might be painful for those concerned but is necessary for our country.

These are not simple issues with simple answers. Yet, we need to have a political leadership capable of tackling them with the seriousness they demand whilst promoting national debates around them. Similarly, with an even much greater measure of seriousness, we must tackle our war on HIV/AIDS. We must become single-minded about HIV/AIDS and deal with it as if it were a war, because the casualties it is imposing on our society exceeds those of any other war we have known. In reacting to the 9-11 attack, which reportedly killed less than 3,000 Americans, the US Government declared a war on terrorism and with single-mindedness pursued, it across the world, to the point of having to take responsibility to eradicate terrorism and promote accelerated development, freedom and democracy in the most remote corners of the globe. In our context we are dealing with a situation, which threatens to kill millions of our people, and we deal with it with complacency and reservations. It saddens me that we should wonder whether we should use anti retro viral drugs or not, when the information before all of us is that they may save the lives of 1.7 million South Africans and spare 860,000 of our children from becoming orphans.

This is a real crisis on which we ought to ponder. One does not wish to turn the great drama and tragedy of HIV/AIDS into a political football, which accounts for the fact that I have always tried to speak about this issue with moderation avoiding any divisive or critical language. However, in order to expedite the process required to save lives not by the thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, it is necessary that we snap out of the present complacency and that we recognise that something has gone dramatically wrong, and we just cannot continue to keep going on in the same manner. Also in respect of our war on HIV/AIDS there is conventional wisdom, which can be applied to solve the problem. What is thus far lacking has been a concerted and single-minded political will capable of mobilising the whole of the country in this great war of ours.

For instance, I have often made a point, which seems to have fallen on deaf ears, that we must use clinics in all major work-places to roll out anti retro viral drugs. Such clinics will be able to administer these drugs on a daily or periodic basis to people who are treated as out-patients, whilst monitoring side effects and the correctness of their usage by the patients. Obviously, in order to perform this function, clinics and workplaces would need to be strengthened significantly, either by Government transferring resources to them or by giving them significant tax breaks. As one would do in a war, ammunition to fight HIV/AIDS must be reticulated and distributed through each possible and qualified outlet. We also need more and better-trained troops.

I was very concerned in reading reports of an answer given by the Minister of Health to a parliamentary question in which she stated that our public health system lacks 31,000 nurses who are not available in our domestic job market. For this reason, I immediately wrote to her reminding her that as the Minister of Home Affairs I have the power of opening our immigration doors to foreigners with the particularly required and needed skills. I can use an extraordinary provision in our new immigration legislation which enables me to give foreigners with determined skills which are needed, such as nurses, a work permit even though they do not have a job offer on the assumption that once they are in South Africa, because of their skills, they will eventually find their place through ordinary labour market dynamics. I cannot exercise this power myself, as it requires consultation with the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Trade and Industry. I am awaiting a reply from the Minister of Health. I am mentioning this to signify that if one takes the issue of HIV/AIDS as seriously as I do and, indeed, deals with it as if it were a war, this becomes a priority, which calls for immediate action. However, that is often not the case.

We just cannot sit on problems in the hope that they will go away. For years I had to make the statement in Parliament, including the State of the Nation debate this year, and other fora that the conditions of life of people in rural areas have deteriorated since 1994 and that there is now much greater poverty and hunger in rural areas than there was in 1994. This problem has not yet been fully acknowledged and there is not sufficient strategy to redress it. I have often stated that unless poverty, malnutrition and underdevelopment are addressed in rural areas, there will be little chance for long-term prosperity and stability in urban areas. A country like ours cannot remain so skewed for so long. We need a government capable of recognising the dramatic nature of this problem and making it a real priority. Instead, our Government has often pursued ideological imperatives such as the undermining of traditional leadership and traditional authorities, which is something, which is setting back prosperity and stability in rural areas. Instead, we would need to deliver plans of subsistence economy and subsistence agriculture to traditional authorities to ensure that everyone in rural areas can satisfy the primary of all needs, which is that of being able to feed himself and his family, with a healthy and balanced diet.

Finally, and I really say last but not least, is the problem of corruption. This is a wide-ranging problem. It does not only affect government, but also the private sector. It is about living in a society in which in order to move forward in life, one needs to have friends and connections. It is about having to have political influence in order to transact business or securing government contracts. It is about the disparity between the dream embodied in empowering programmes and the reality of a very few people enriching themselves. It is about the greed for power and the complacency of those who feel that they are above the law. I t is about the daily disintegration of the rule of law because people break the rules and assume that they are immune of the dictates of the rule of law. It is about a society, which does not work by the rules, but makes rules up as it works. Corruption is a monster with a thousand faces, which is, unfortunately, taking root in our government and civil society alike. It feeds on the greed for power.

We must defeat it by substituting the greed for power with the culture of service. We need a class of politicians who can hold government accountable and who are, themselves, accountable to the people. It is not possible to hold people accountable unless they fear that they may be in trouble if they do not mend their ways and improve on their performance. At present there is no such fear in most of our political class. They feel that they are there to stay. Therefore, it is essential that the next elections reverse this status of affairs by sending a message that things must change and that the people are, indeed, capable of producing such a change irrespective of what those who are in power wish to see happen. If this is to be achieved something very simple needs to be obtained. For the sake of democracy, the ruling party needs to be cut down to a smaller size. There cannot be accountability unless those who are in power feel the bite of the electorate and fear its judgment. Our democracy is in great jeopardy because of the power of a political party, which can change the Constitution as it sees fit, and has proven that it has no qualms to do so to pursue its own political agenda and convenience. The crossing-of-the-floor legislation proved that the ruling party cannot be trusted with our Constitution and that it will tamper with it whenever, and however, it pleases it.

These are very serious reflections on which we must all engage because they affect our future. At present our constitutional order is in jeopardy and the Constitution is meaningless because it can be changes at will. There is just no resort not remedy to ensure its safety from capricious amendments. You will remember that most of you in the press criticised the ANC when they wanted to have a retrospective provision in the crossing-of-the-floor constitutional amendment. None of your criticism dissuaded them from going ahead with their plan. They were stopped only when we made it clear that we were about to call an early election in KwaZulu-Natal and that they would be defeated by the electorate. They backed down eight hours before we were to pass an irretrievable resolution, which would have triggered such an early election. Our action preserved some degree of constitutional morality in that fashion, but such measure will not be available time and again when new threats to our Constitution present themselves.

We were also not able to stop the constitutional amendment, which went through, the only purpose of which was that of enabling the ANC to secure political control of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal not through elections, but through a political manoeuvre and a legislative edict. To this day the provincial leader of the ANC continues to plot relentlessly to secure the support of minority parties to oust and depose the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal. Just yesterday afternoon he invited all the minority parties to a meeting in Durban hotel which had on the agenda plotting ways and means of toppling the Premier Mtshali before next year's election. Obviously, one gains the impression that the ANC itself knows that they are not likely to gain the premiership of KwaZulu-Natal fairly and squarely through the electoral process from the electorate through the elections in nine months and must gain before the people have spoken. This proves that the ruling party has no respect for the rules of democracy and will bend it however and whenever possible to secure its grip on power. They are looking for nothing else but total power. It is not only total power in government that they are seeking but, indeed, total power of the economy and other segments of civil society. The stake at the next elections are those of preserving democracy and also the possibility that South Africa may in the end develop a truly open, pluralistic and dynamic society. We must make no mistake. We are now looking squarely in the face of an embryonic one-party state in gestation. In nine months it will be the time when either democracy or a one-party state will triumph in the next elections. For this reason it is just not sufficient to cut down the ANC to below the two-thirds majority threshold.

If the ANC is merely cut down below the two-thirds majority threshold it will maintain its features and culture because it will be able to continue to rule by itself. It will pursue the same agenda without changing its final destination. It will see it merely as a setback. Instead, we need to ensure that it changes its culture and ways of doing politics. It must be forced to understand the need to seek consensus and overcome the politics of divisions with the politics of unity. To this end, it is necessary that the voters have the courage to deprive the ruling party of the right to rule by itself and therefore of its absolute parliamentary majority. The press will have a fundamental role to play in making people understand that they have the right and the duty to do so and the connection between this issue and the solutions to the problem, which I mentioned earlier. We need to have a change for the better. Obviously, this leads to questions about what is to replace an ANC government if the electorate choose to cut the ANC to below the fifty percent threshold. I have received many questions in this respect and I think that it is not for me to answer them until the people have spoken.

I have vented certain ideas, which can only be taken further by the people. There are times in which leaders need to speak, and there are times when it is for the people to speak and for leaders to listen. I cannot take further the ideas, which I have voiced, in many fora about a coalition of willing parties until the people have spoken and given us direction. I have often stated that if I were the President I would invite Mr Leon in my Cabinet as well as the chosen representative of the ANC because we need a united South Africa to tackle the issues I mentioned earlier and create a long-term vision. However, somebody else may need to make the invitation either to me, or to Mr Leon to participate in their Cabinet depending on what the electorate may decide. Until the electorate have spoken we cannot have the presumption of saying what will happen after the elections and it would be arrogant from our side even to speculate.

What is clear is that the IFP and the DA are like-minded parties who see eye to eye on a variety of issues, especially those which I have mentioned earlier. This is not something, which developed in the past year merely for reason of political expediency, but has been the case for twenty years if we consider the position of Inkatha as the then cultural liberation movement. We cooperated with the then Progressive Federal Party, later the Democratic Party, and we have taken similar stands since 1983 and throughout the constitutional negotiations process on issues such as devolution of powers. It is also not new for me to bring people together across existing political, cultural and social divides. I did so in 1980 with the Buthelezi Commission, in 1983 with the Black Alliance with which we rejected the tricameral system, in 1986 with the KwaZulu-Natal Indaba and in 1989 with the KwaZulu-Natal Joint Executive Authority. I have always believed in the policy of inclusion rather than that of exclusion and on issue-based politics, rather than alliance-based voting. Our relationship with the DA in local government and at the provincial level stems out of these principles, which would, undoubtedly, shape whatever relationship we may have with the DA after the elections. Obviously, the voters are entitled to know beforehand what political parties will do if they are elected or strengthened through the elections, and everyone is required to make commitments beforehand on what one will do after elections.

My commitments are known. I have pursued them all my life with single-minded enthusiasm. I am not going to change. The commitment I make is that of continuing with as much enthusiasm as I have ever had to carry the struggle forward without allowing complacency to set me back or to allow me to rest. I hope that God will continue to give me the strength to serve my people and the country I love.

I thank you.

Source: Department of Home Affairs (http://home-affairs.pwv.gov.za)