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19 February 2009

Honourable speaker
Honourable premier
Members of Executive Committee
Honourable members of the provincial legislature
Departmental officials
Ladies and gentlemen

Let me join other honourable members to welcome the State of the Provincial Address (SOPA) delivered by the honourable Premier.

The progress we have made in the past five years is a reflection of our commitment to address poverty and inequality that has visited our people. It is also an indication that the programme of the second decade of freedom to strengthen democracy and to accelerate programmes to improve the quality of life of our people is on course.

Honourable Speaker, it is equally important to sketch the context in which our social transformation agenda is unfolding. At the point of change of government in 1994, a lot of compromises have been made and were seen as necessary to ensure broadest possible legitimacy of the new order and to advance into a truly united, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous society.

The economy was in the hands of the few, whilst it is a critical factor to advance social transformation. The legacy of apartheid was glaring amongst the black majority of our population. Access to social services like quality education, health services, social grants free of inequalities, access to electricity, water and sanitation, houses, access to productive land, reflected huge gaps between white and previously oppressed black communities. The backlogs of infrastructure in the former homelands are part of that apartheid legacy and they remain with us to date.

The argument advanced by some honourable members that legacy of apartheid should not be a scapegoat is incorrect and dangerous. It suggests that at the point of our take over we should not have affirmed the previously disadvantaged. The danger with these kind of statements is that we can be easily made to lose sight of the essence of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) which is the liberation of black people in general and Africans in particular from political, economic and social bondages of the past.

Progress made in addressing socio-economic challenges of the people has improved the quality of life of our people in the past fifteen years. All these initiatives have benefited the majority of the poor and improved their household incomes. The expansion of child support grant to fifteen years and ultimately to eighteen years, equalisation of old age grants between men and women is meant to improve household incomes and to address poverty and to cushion the poor from the impact of global economic downturn.

The expansion of school nutrition programme to higher grades including high schools in quintile 1 will contribute immensely in the health status of learners and quality of learning. The extension of no fee school policy to quintile three schools has pushed the percentage of learners benefiting from this to more than 60%. Provision of scholar transport has also improved the access to schooling and education in general.

The improvements in the TB cure rate, lowering of infant and child mortality and maternal deaths and positive indicators to ensure a healthy nation. The Comprehensive Care Management and Treatment of Sexual transmitted infection (STIs) and HIV and AIDS is one of the biggest treatment programmes in the world. By expansion of Antiretroviral (ART) sites to 74 facilities we have expanded access to treatment to the poor that was not benefiting. This has a major contribution in improving life expectancy of our people and ensuring that we meet our millennium development goals of reducing new infections by 50% by 2014.

The ruling party will continue with the programme that we have put in place for the second decade of freedom.

Firstly, we have identified education as our priority to improve quality of teaching and learning, ensuring school functionality, recruitment and development of educators, improvement of assessment tools and training of Early Child Development (ECD) Practitioners to improve quality of primary education, and intensifying poverty combating initiatives like school nutrition programme, scholar transport, school uniforms and no fee school policy, and development of infrastructure and provisioning of material to enhance education outcomes.

Secondly, we have prioritised health and will pay particular focus on national health insurance that will ensure free access to health services for the poor, the improvement of health infrastructure, and improvement of quality of service in health institutions; intensification of struggle against HIV and AIDS and other communicable and non communicable diseases.

As part of the building of sustainable livelihoods, the ruling party will also focus on the rural development land and agrarian transformation. Whilst on the one hand, we will continue with provision of social security net for those vulnerable to poverty, as a developmental state we will focus on rural development to take our people out of dependency on grants and to ensure self sufficiency and food security for our people.

Honourable speaker, I am pleased with the current political trends where political parties seem to be agreeing with the content of the African National Congress (ANC) manifesto. Their manifesto actually supports our priorities for the next five years and has not brought anything new. I agree with the ANC Secretary-General, that this phenomenon is an indication of emergence of national consensus on the key issues affecting our people. However, I want to move further and say that this is an indication of the overwhelming support of ANC policies by all the parties and the people of this country and the confidence in the leadership of the ANC. I am looking forward to the overwhelming renewal of the mandate of the ANC on 22 April 2009.

Thank you, Honourable speaker

Issued by: Department of Education, Eastern Cape Provincial Government
19 February 2009
Source: Eastern Cape Provincial Government (http://www.ecprov.gov.za/)