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Whenever I am faced with a daunting moment, a moment when the eyes of society are on us as a collective, when society expects us to rise above ourselves and the interests to which we are bonded, when society expects us to make decisions which will better their lives, at such daunting moments I turn to the work of Michael Ignatieff.

The work I refer to is "The Needs of Strangers". In some way this Growth and Development Summit is such a daunting moment because it challenges us fundamentally to respond to the needs of strangers who, by virtue of being unknown can easily be ignored and their needs forgotten.

Michael Ignatieff challenges us and presents us with a curious dilemma: "There are people who have had to survive on so little for so long in our society that their needs have withered away to barest necessity. Is it wrong to raise their expectations, to give them a sense of things they have gone without? Is it wrong to argue that the strangers at my door should not be content with the scraps at the barrow? Any politics which wants to improve the conditions of their lives has to speak for needs which they themselves may not be able to articulate. That is why politics is such a dangerous business: to mobilize a majority for change you must raise expectations and create needs which leap beyond the confines of existing reality. To create needs is to create discontent, and to invite disillusionment. It is to play with lives and hopes. The only safeguard in this dangerous game is the democratic requirement of informed consent. One has no right to speak for needs which those one represents cannot intelligibly recognize as their own. When is it right to speak for the needs of strangers? Politics is not only the art of representing the needs of strangers; it is also the perilous business of speaking on behalf of needs which strangers have had no chance to articulate on their own."

This GDS must send out a signal that to expect more than mere survival is legitimate. That indeed our politics is about improving the conditions of the poor. That what we emerge with is the articulation of needs and plans which those on whose behalf we gather can intelligibly recognize as their own.

This is indeed a perilous business. But this is the time for all of us to rise to the occasion because the needs of strangers are urgent and pressing. This is not the time for us as social partners: government, business, labour and community to be over-cautious and risk averse. Our only insurance against such peril is that we emerge with plans which we are able to implement.

The signs are there that unless we gather our collective wills, identify the common ground, manage our differences, and pool our resources, unless this intervention occurs now, we will find that we are too late, that the tenuous equilibrium in our society cannot hold any longer and that the needs of strangers are more forcefully becoming the claims of strangers at our doors.

It is incongruous for those who have families to care for, for the unemployed, those who live here in hunger and those who come here in expectation, it is incongruous to explain that their condition is so bad when our growth in GDP has remained at 2,9% higher that the average national growth; that in 2002 more that a million tourists visited the Cape; and that our exports grew by 48% last year. The signs are of prosperity, but the experience is of poverty.
Unless this disjuncture is addressed openly and honestly, starting at this GDS, we will gather in a few years to discuss a social catastrophe - as we do so readily in the context of Zimbabwe.

The President, President Thabo Mbeki, has challenged us on 2 very important fronts, and if we respond urgently and correctly, at this GDS, then we would have gone a long way to averting such a social catastrophe. Firstly, the President challenges us to get more people less dependent on welfare and more involved in the economy where they should earn their living. The second challenge is that we should integrate the 2 very distinct economies in our country - the first, modern and competitive, the second, survivalist and impoverished.

These are exacting challenges, and we need to respond - not just urgently - but together. This must be a partnership of commitment and contribution. The task cannot accept freeloaders. The gini co-efficient, that measure between the rich and the poor, does not just illustrate that we have great disparities, and that those disparities are also racially defined, but an interesting dimension of the gini co-efficient shows us that there is also a difference between the social wage and the economic wage. The disparity in the economic wage - based on how much people earn in the economy - is dangerously high whereas when the entire basket of government grants, services and amenities are added to make up the social wage, the disparities are immediately reduced. This is not only unsustainable, but also shows a society that is absolutely reliant on government to act as the bulwark between the poor and devastating poverty. Government cannot carry the burden against poverty on its own.

And so we come to our partners to engage with them on how best we can make the transition from welfare dependence to economic self-reliance for our people. We want to share with our partners the fact that already we commit 80% of our budgets on, at best, warding off poverty, without having the financial manoeuvring space to invest in the economy the resources required.
We come seeking partnerships so that together we can exploit the opportunities in our economy and together we can confront the difficulties.

There are opportunities in our economy in the Western Cape. Besides tourism, the finance, insurance, real estate and business services sector has been the largest contributor to growth since 1995, contributing 26,6% to provincial GDP. Yet this sector requires skilled labour.

On the other hand, the manufacturing share of GDP has declined form 21,3% in 1995 to 18,3% in 2001, while over a similar period agriculture declined form 6,2% to 5,2%. Both these sectors are sectors which have absorbed existing skills or the unskilled workforce.

Our unemployment figure of 23,16% has to be seen in the context of the structural shift in the economy towards the tertiary sectors. While 55 out of every 100 new entrants found work in the Western Cape, the combined effect of the demand for skilled labour and the devastating legacy of Apartheid's particular harshness to the African community through for example job reservation in the Western Cape means that only 3 out of 100 Africans found employment in the Western Cape between 1995 and 2002. This is hardly a foundation for the non - racial future we want to build.

The fact that 82% of all unemployment is amongst the youth begins to say that not only is the economy restructuring in the direction of higher skills, our education system is not even putting our graduates in a position to compete for skilled jobs. Hence it was exciting to have seen youth come together before the GDS to speak about the economy, their expectations and plans for it.

Government comes to you today to say that we know what needs to be done. Under the banner of iKapa elihlumayo - our strategy to grow and share the Cape - we are already putting in place the building blocks for growth in the economy by focusing on tourism, the film industry, the oil and gas industry, the clothing and textile sector, agriculture, craft, automotive parts, call centres, business processing etc. We are also aware that our growth has over the last year slowed down as the Rand gained strength and it affected our export trade, particularly in clothing, textiles, agriculture and fishing. We know that this will complicate an already difficult task. Government wants to send out a message to the thousands in the clothing factories and on the farms that that we are not fatalistic about our future, but we are, in partnership, fighting for your future by adjusting to the global market and ensuring that you are the beneficiaries of our combined efforts.

The task of sharing the economy of the Cape will be more difficult unless the defence and creation of jobs as well as the sharing of ownership through empowerment becomes a task we are all committed to. But we cannot turn back from sharing ownership with those historically disadvantaged and the women of our society.

The time is right for all of us to respond to the needs of strangers. The times is right for a consensus in the Western Cape on Growth, Skills and Jobs. It is through skills and jobs that most of our citizens will feel that they are sharing in this economy.

Skills have definitely become the precondition for employment. Our task team on Human Resources has began to put in place some ideas on how we must get the entire pipeline of skills development working towards one single goal - from Early Childhood Development right through to the work of the SETAS. Government will leave this GDS absolutely committed to getting value for money for our investment in education. We cannot graduate one generation after the other without them having a more that equal chance of finding employment.

In a spirit of commitment we hope that all social partners will leave this GDS pursuing concrete targets whether around learnerships, the creation of jobs in different sectors, the procurement and purchases in line with being Proudly South African, partnerships for strategic infrastructure, reinvestment in the domestic economy, the direction of provident and pension funds into productive and job creating sections of the economy, and the freeing up of our workforce to upgrade their skills through the SETAS.

In all of this, government is not only willing to be a partner, but where necessary, to take the lead, to stimulate the economy, to utilise and transform its natural tools at the service of getting more of our people into the mainstream of the economy, by driving a micro-economic strategy.

Government does not come into this GDS without commitment. The fact that 8 National Government Departments, most Western Cape Local Governments, many State-owned Enterprises and Development Finance Institutions, our public entities, and the whole of the Western Cape Government is here today is testimony not only to the growing reality of Co-operative Governance but also to government's commitment to finding urgent solutions through partnerships for Growth, Skills and Jobs.

Government awaits the outcome of this GDS to intensify our action. There are about 200 000 Public Work jobs that the President has commanded us to create; of the learnerships to be established in this Province we are challenged as government to establish 1 000; and the iKapa elihlumayo fund will be activated within 2 weeks of this GDS to stimulate and incubate industrial sectors, enterprises of all sizes and to kick-start a Human Resources and Skills Development Strategy in this Province.

"Is it wrong to raise their expectations, to give them a sense of things they have gone without?" Michael Ignatieff asks.

"That is why politics is such a dangerous business: to mobilise a majority for change you must raise expectations ...." he says.

We raise expectations only because we have seen the urgency, only because we have done our homework, only because we will remain in dialogue with our social partners, only because we have established a stable provincial government, confident that we can make choices and decisions into the long term.

We raise not only expectations, but we create hope in a people who have shown remarkable resilience through the apartheid years, and enormous patience over the last decade. We know, and they know that the next decade must be the economic decade. Our people trust the government of Thabo Mbeki to have a plan for growth, skills and jobs, just like we had a macro-economic plan to immunise us against the storms of the global economy.

We raise not only hope, but a common purpose around which to unite our people, so long divided by the fight for the scraps which are thrown from the main table of the economy. Hopefully we also raise a sense of patriotism and generosity amongst those who have historically been advantaged and who will be inspired to continue to grow the Cape but also share it.

Today we say to our people we have a vision of a Cape which will grow and which we must share. It is a 360° vision for not only do we look forward to the future we look on the sides to those who have been marginalised and we look to the back for those who have been left behind in the Cape of Storms and to say to all: Ikapa elihlumayo is about you. To all we offer Vision 360 around which to rally. Only such a vision, backed up by action, can begin to give our children the chance to dream of a future where they will no longer stand as unskilled strangers at the door of a modern, competitive economy. Not only must they yearn to be workers in that economy, but entrepreneurs and owners in the enterprises driving that economy.

This is not an undue expectation. Let us all today engage in unity and partnership, in the words again of Michael Ignatieff, in the perilous politics of "speaking on behalf of needs which strangers have had no change to articulate on their own".

Issued by: Western Cape Provincial Government
14 November 2003