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Address by the Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa, Ms. Baleka Mbete, at the University of Kwazulu Natal
1 April 2009
Thank you for receiving me as your guest at this important University, and for the opportunity to share with you my thoughts on the state of our democracy today. I hope to also reflect on what I think is our joint responsibility – leaders in Government, our higher education institutions and intellectuals – to sustaining and rekindling what is often called the miracle that has made our country a success over the last fifteen years.The theme of my address is: “Freedom with Responsibility”. I believe that our freedom in 1994 imposed on us all – leaders, higher education institutions and intellectuals – a set of responsibilities, all of which point to one challenge: Serving the people and the country.
In the next few weeks we will be heading to the polls to once again give a mandate to a leadership collective that will oversee the affairs of our country for the next five years. We have done so thrice since 1994, but every time we do so we celebrate what we have achieved as a people and pay homage, as Solomon Mahlangu once said, to those who had to lay down their lives to water the tree of our freedom.
This period has also its downside. In our competition for the support of our electorate through our various political formations we sometimes do so to the detriment of some of the ideals that keep us together as a nation. All of us try very hard, sometimes too hard, to convince the electorate that we offer a better alternative to the incumbent. One of the issues that have been used in this regard is the suggestion by some commentators and political parties that we are or about to become a failed state. This negative message about the state and future of our country may have been made as part of an election campaign strategy, but it has its dangers that can only benefit those who propagate the stereotype that out of Africa, the “Dark Continent”, comes nothing.
One South African who lives in Scotland made a similar observation in February last year:
Imagine my shock this morning, in opening the Sunday edition of the Glasgow Herald, to discover, courtesy of Fred Bridgland, that "the lights are ... going out all over South Africa as crime, corruption and mismanagement push the rainbow country towards becoming another failed African state." I nearly choaked on my coffee. Is he writing about the same country I visited three weeks ago?
It''s always interesting to observe reports of my country''s immanent demise in the papers, and then compare it to the relatively prosaic reality: Yes, there''s plenty wrong with South Africa, but there''s been plenty wrong with it since white people landed in 1652. Hopefully we''re beginning to fix some of these things now.
The reality is far more complex and nuanced than Bridgland suggests. Despite serious problems, the country is far from a lost cause. Today, it is infinitely better than it was under apartheid, and it is still a work in progress.
The claim that we are or about to become a “failed state” not only fails to talk to facts on the ground; it is also not informed by the history behind the concept of “failed states”. This concept was developed in the West to provide a legal, moral and ideological justification to invading countries in an international system that recognizes and protects the sovereignty of states. Sebastian Mallaby, one of the proponents of the concept, explained a few years ago in an article entitled: “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire”:
“Lawrence Summers, the dominant professor-politician of the Clinton years, used to say that the United States is history''s only non-imperialist superpower. But is this claim anything to boast about today? The war on terrorism has focused attention on the chaotic states that provide profit and sanctuary to nihilist outlaws, from Sudan and Afghanistan to Sierra Leone and Somalia. When such power vacuums threatened great powers in the past, they had a ready solution: imperialism. But since World War II, that option has been ruled out. After more than two millennia of empire, orderly societies now refuse to impose their own institutions on disorderly ones.
This anti-imperialist restraint is becoming harder to sustain, however, as the disorder in poor countries grows more threatening. Civil wars have grown nastier and longer”.
The solution, so goes the argument, is “intervention” or “regime change” – and we have, indeed, seen this remedy being attempted with disastrous consequences in some parts of the world.
South Africa is not a “failed state”. Even in the controversial Failed States Index 2008 of the Fund for Peace – with its twelve social, economic and political indicators – we are ranked 125 out of 177 countries. Topping the ranking are Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Chad and Iraq (in that order). My reference to this Index must not be understood as any form of legitimizing it or what informs its output.
Yes, we have the freedom to speak in this country. We can decorate our parties and election manifestos with whatever colours and messages we want. We shout slogans to get the attention of citizens. But the road that brought us to this moment denies us the freedom to act irresponsibly with consequences that have implications for the confidence we have in our country and its international standing. Yes, we do have challenges that require our attention as we move forward to build on the achievements of the last fifteen years. More importantly, we have everything to be proud of for each hurdle, each obstacle we have been able to succeed inspite of.
Our transition since 1994 has made an important contribution to the enrichment of social sciences dedicated to the study of societies emerging from conflicts. Ours has not been a straight-forward and simple experience, but we have managed to prevail and remain confident as we move into the future.
We had to overcome, simultaneously, six interlinked challenges whose solution was critical to the success of our transition:
· We had to engineer a process of decolonization of our country to rid it of apartheid;
· We had to build democratic institutions and practice where apartheid authoritarianism once ruled;
· We had to devise a response to meeting expectations of the historically disadvantaged;
· We had to forgive but never forget as part of the healing to bring into being a new nation that I have been humbled when many in the world congratulate us today;
· We had to transform an economy that was in disarray and decline into one that is prosperous and geared towards creating descent work and wealth to share; and
· We had to re-enter the world from which we had been ejected because of the policy of apartheid to play our role in Africa and the whole international system.
We are here today, a few weeks away from our fourth national election, because we have succeeded in taking on the challenges that our freedom in 1994 imposed on us as a people.
Significant gains have, indeed, been registered as demonstrated in the Community Survey of Statistics South Africa of 2007. For instance, 88,6% of households had access to piped water in 2007 compared with 84,5% in 2001. Similarly, 80% of households had access to electricity in 2007, compared with 69,7% in 2001. With respect to sanitation, 60.4% of households had access to flush toilets compared with 51,9% in 2001. The number of households using the bucket toilet system was reduced from 4.1% of households in 2001 to 2.3% in 2007.
Ladies and gentlemen
Academic theorists who work on “democratic transition” normally use the number of elections as a measure of the extent to which democracy is consolidated in a country, and would distinguish between “founding” and successive elections. This is a useful approach especially that some countries battle, after their “founding” election, to hold a credible election whose results are accepted without question. Some of these countries battle with this challenge to the point of degenerating into civil war.
However, we had set for ourselves a more ambitious target as shown above – that is: decolonization, democratization, delivering on expectations, nation-building, transformation of the economy, and finding our place in international affairs.
It is thanks to the work we have done over the last fifteen years that when former President Thabo Mbeki was recalled our institutions demonstrated strength and resilience which we need as pillar to support our democracy. Our people also showed that they have confidence in our institutions. Had this not been the case, we would have seen demonstrations all over aimed at rendering the country ungovernable as was experienced in Madagascar, for example. Instead, people used available platforms in the system, including radio talk shows and newspapers, to express their views. Others even went further in the expression of their constitutional right to form a new political party. But the point is that a very painful process was carefully managed from Friday 19 September to Friday 26 September without a single drop of blood being shed. In that week our institutions were seriously tested and found to be well and maturing beyond the teenage age we actually are. The party, media, parliament, the Executive, the judiciary; all played a role in ensuring a smooth transition.
We can only echo here the statement issued by the European Union at the time that: “Once again South Africa’s democracy has proved its high degree of maturity”.
Our elite (in politics, economy and society in general) have also demonstrated that they play by the rules in their competition for political office or over resources. When elites have not accepted the rules of the game they can resort to means outside the system to seek redress or advance their fractional interests. This can take the form of refusing to accept an election result and resort to populist demonstrations or taking up arms – as opposed to approaching the courts – to remove from power what they consider to be an illegitimate regime.
This has not happened and is not about to happen. Suggestions by some surveys that there has been a decline, for example, in public confidence in our institutions are normal in a democracy. This becomes a problem when this decline in public confidence in our institutions results in people trying to seek redress or advance their interests outside the system.
Programme Director
Another argument, also linked to electioneering but that has been in circulation in academic circles for a while, is the suggestion that “dominant parties “and liberation movements are inherently a threat to democracy. This is true when parties use the dominance they command in the legislature and the determination of government and its policies to act irresponsibly and promote only the interests of the elite in power. But this is not so in our country.
In fact, the alternative propagated by critics of the dominant party system can also be a threat to the success and survival of transitions like ours. For example, imagine a stalemate between the executive and the legislature on passing a law that is critical to the transformation of our country. Imagine a two-party system where the other party represents interests that belong to the painful history of our past. Or, imagine our country being led by a coalition comprised of parties that do not share a common vision. What will happen to our programme of transformation? Coalition governments can be so unstable as we have seen in many parts of the world, and the political elite in such a system tend to be focused on the narrow interests of their parties than the general good.
I am happy that, in our case, the ruling party has acted with responsibility and used its dominant status to transform our country to rid it of the legacy of apartheid and deliver on the hopes and aspirations of our people.
As for liberation movements, they only become a threat to democracy when they abandon the path of the struggle that had led to freedom; when they use the freedom that many had fought for to advance the interests of the few; when they no longer listen or learn from their successes and failures; when they elevate themselves above those they ought to serve and see themselves as the only makers of history; and when instead of listening, they unleash the coercive might of the state onto those whose voices they wish to silence.
From listening and learning from internal and external experience, our ruling party used the opportunity of its last National Conference to reflect and agree to put in place measures to manage the relationship between the party and Government. This will help to hold the party and its cadreship constantly accountable and responsible to society. It will also ensure that those in the state machinery themselves remain conscious that they are deployed to serve. They serve the people on behalf of their party, whose policies they implement in Government, as spelt out in the manifesto that the majority of voters support in the election.
Ladies and gentlemen
Our Government consciously sought to integrate historically fragmented communities by, amongst other things, establishing municipal governments that internalised previously divided communities within a single municipal area and local economy. Integration was also pursued as state practice to correct complex problems of interdepartmental and intergovernmental co-ordination that had arisen as all three spheres sought to give effect to co-operative governance.
The choice to establish a local sphere of government was a choice about how to directly link services provided by the state to citizens at community level. The municipalities of the country are the one “space” shared by all spheres of government. Whilst a municipality must govern its area of jurisdiction, its role is not insulated from the services provided by the other two spheres, because all state action ultimately converges on communities living in municipal areas.
Through decisive action of government, a system of intergovernmental relations evolved rapidly since 1994, through practice, experiment and by deliberate statutory intervention. The promulgation of the last constitutionally obligatory legislation in the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Act, 2005 was the culmination of the codification of the best practice in IGR. This has contributed towards the inculcation of a co-operative governance culture in the conduct of public servants and politicians.
The task of accountability by the spheres will demand decision and leadership, forging stronger forms of collaboration and partnership between the spheres when needed, boosting performance and accountability, entrenching a service ethos in all areas of public service, constituting core capability within the state, and finding more effective ways to get things done.
The extent to which all three spheres successfully perform their functions, find common ground for joint action, and productively reconcile difference, diversity, and autonomy in pursuing common objectives will be the crucial yardstick for measuring overall state performance in the next decade.
Programme Director
This University was in the trenches during our struggle for freedom, and has, indeed, never succumbed to the comfort that came with our liberation in 1994. It is still part of the voices in this country that we ought to listen to; it is still in the forefront of those that are actively making our history as we continue to create a better life for all.
We owe it to the likes of Steve Biko who was once a student here to preserve and continue this rich tradition of struggle. We will never forget those who fell and those who survived in battles which were fought against apartheid tyranny at Alan Taylor Residence, for example.
This University plays its role as part of the higher education sector in our country. But also its members play a role, in their individual capacities, in various intellectual activities aimed at generating knowledge to help our country see the light necessary for us to go in the right direction.
Our higher education has undergone major restructuring in recent years, the institutional effects of which are still being felt. New organisational arrangements, quality assurance procedures, financing processes, and new relationships between the state and the institutions have called for new responses and adjustments by the key stakeholders involved.
Yet the expansion of university education has been constrained by the fact that too few South Africans pass matric with a university exemption. It is only since 2003 that the number of matriculants with exemption has remained over 80,000 each year. Over the past ten years the proportion of African matriculants with exemption failed to grow beyond the 50,000 number on average.
However, there are signs from the National Senior Certificate written for the first time last year, that the trend is now upwards and that universities are going to need to expand to accommodate the growing numbers qualified to study.
Expansion means an expansion of funding. State funding of higher education was in decline until comparatively recently. The state subsidy tracked inflation between 1996 and 2005 and did not take account of increased activities in the sector.
Universities were only able to make ends meet by doubling their income from student fees between 2001 and 2008. A number of higher education institutions face serious financial problems that have put their academic operations at serious risk.
This state of affairs was not unique to South Africa. It was a European trend. It was an American trend. And it was and is an African trend.
According to a report that was presented last year to African Ministers of Finance, enrolments in African universities tripled between 1991 and 2005, expanding at an annual rate of 8.7%, which is one of the highest regional growth rates in the world. However, over a 25 year period, the spending per student declined from an average of US $6,800 per year to a low of US $981 in 2005 for 33 countries.
One of the very substantial achievements of our present Government has been to halt the decline in per capita funding that occurred in the ten years before 2006.
Government funding of the public higher education system has risen sharply in real terms. In 2007/08, government funds for public higher education totalled R15.3 billion. In 2009/10 government funds are R19.3 billion, which is R4 billion (or 27%) higher than that for 2007/08. Government funding of higher education is expected to continue to increase at rates above inflation.
However, our national knowledgebase is not growing or expanding, its international visibility and impact (even compared to similar sizes science systems) is confined to traditional niche areas, and participation in knowledge production is still confined to a relatively small core of active scientists. In short, our reproductive capacity and intellectual output remains very limited.
Yet we live in an era where, as one report of the World Bank and UNESCO on higher education described some nine years ago, “the world economy is changing as knowledge supplants physical capital as the source of present (and future) wealth”. We have to grow our capacity in this regard by investing, as state and private actors, in our science and technology capability in order to advance our country and compete globally.
We should be concerned when our gross expenditure on Research and Development (R&D) as percentage of GDP in 2004 was less than 1 (one) percent while that of Sweden was almost 4% and that of South Korea and China were at 2.63% and 1.44 percent respectively. Even our human resources R & D capability does not compare well with the best in the world with our country at 1.6 Full Time Equivalent researchers per 1000 total employment while that of Sweden and South Korea were at 11 and 6.8 respectively.
It is in joint action of Government, the higher education fraternity, business and the NGO community that we can increase our R & D competitivity. Business alone accounts for more than 50% of the total performance of our R & D sector.
As we pull up our socks in our joint action we should not lose sight of our racial and gender realities that the end of apartheid has not fully buried. For example, white authors accounted for over 80% of royalties paid out by publishers surveyed for the Annual Book Publishing Industry Survey Report 2000, as opposed to about 18% for blacks. At the helm of this publishing industry are white compatriots who occupy over 65% of top executive positions.
Women may account for the big majority of total student enrolment in our higher education sector, but their numbers decline at postgraduate level. We have also made progress in our higher education sector in working towards gender parity in the profile of our academic staff with the share of women increasing between the 1990s to 2001 from around 30% to 40%. But this is still not enough especially that 70% of these women are from our white community as opposed to 33% from African, Indian and Coloured sections of our society.
Our joint action should not exempt schools as it is in classrooms that future scientists are reared. In the first flush of our democratic transformation there were three key policy interventions whose impact (intended and otherwise) have shaped the way our school system has developed. First, in equalizing teacher salaries and learner-teacher ratios, many experienced teachers took a severance package rather than take posts in other provinces or regions where they were needed.
Second, we closed teacher-training colleges in the (rural) former Bantustans and chose to move teacher training to universities. It was the right policy decision to take, but it placed training out of the reach of a large constituency of African students. Universities were located in urban centres, entry requirements were stiff, and it was more expensive to study at a university without a bursary. Third, we launched a new curriculum. Its launch was controversial. It was revised. However, many teachers still find it difficult to teach. It is more difficult for the many African teachers, who had trained in the homeland colleges. They found it most challenging to adapt to the new curriculum.
We have done much since 2004 to address these policy challenges. Our focus has been on education quality issues, and in particular on the curriculum and teacher education. The new curriculum has been fine-tuned, a new matric was written last year, and a new teacher education policy has been introduced. In the next five years, we must build on these experiences to address what should be improved in our schooling system.
Ladies and gentlemen
Universities are a home to intellectuals whose contribution to the development of our democracy we value so much. In most of Africa in the period immediately after independence, intellectuals had an uncomfortable coexistence with those in positions of authority. When they were not simply bundled together as part of the “manpower” problem, intellectuals were treated with distrust. Furthermore, as Thandika Mkandawire argued in his African Intellectuals: “African leaders had a penchant for assuming the role of philosopher-king and reducing intellectual work to the level of incantation of the thought of the leader”. But this became unsustainable and African intellectuals were to play a key role in waves of mass movements that democratized most of our countries on the continent in the course of the 1990s.
Our liberation struggle also produced its own organic intellectuals who helped inform and shape our strategies and tactics that we employed to defeat the monster of apartheid. Over the last few years an intelligentsia shaped by the experience of our transition has gained prominence – they scrutinise, sometimes in an outspoken manner, our policies and leadership to the level of detail that makes public office a scary vocation. They provide us with invaluable advice like with the case of the recently published collection on “Zumanomics”. Who can ignore these women and men whose passion for our country is the drive behind the ideas they generate? They refuse to heed the advice of a proverb from Sierra Leon that: “Do not tell the man carrying you that he stinks”. They tell us what they think of us in our face and still expect us to discharge our responsibilities towards our people!
But do intellectuals have any responsibility towards their people, or are they located outside their societies? Edward Said thought it was possible for intellectuals to stand both inside and outside society. Our intellectuals, in the exercise of their freedom of thought, could be informed by a narrow notion of “liberalism” that opposes the “individual” to “community” and ignore questions of relevance and responsibility that come with scholarship.
Robert Hargreaves illustrates in his The First Freedom: A History of Free Speech, the historicity and tension involved in rights that intellectuals enjoy in societies like ours when he said: “… a man who stood at the top of the Capitol steps in ancient Rome and declared, ‘I am a Christian’ faced instant arrest and being thrown to the lions. A millennium and a half later, a man who stood on the selfsame spot and declared, ‘I am not a Christian’ faced an equally speedy arrest followed by death at the stake as a heretic”.
Furthermore, Hargreaves observed that: “Only a Robinson Crusoe can have the complete freedom of speech, the right to shout blasphemous obscenities at the top of his voice or utter libels and hurl racist insults about”.
African scholars who met at the height of the struggle for democracy on the continent to adopt the “Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility” and the “Dar-es-Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Academics” (both adopted in 1990) were fully conscious of the freedom that intellectuals ought to enjoy, what the state should and not do, and responsibilities that they have towards their communities.
Paul Zeleza had in mind this challenge when he wrote in his Rethinking Africa’s Globalization: The Intellectual Challenges:
Intellectuals… cannot be innocent bystanders in the great battles for or against capitalist globalization. Accustomed to analyzing others, intellectuals ought to turn their gaze upon themselves occasionally, wiping the fogs of self-idealization from their mirrors, to become more self-reflexive. There are many myths about intellectuals, foremost among them, that they are more rational and objective than the poor unthinking masses, because they float above particular social interests and possess special powers of social criticism. Romantic notions of intellectual rationality, detachment and marginality persist, despite all the evidence to the contrary that intellectuals have become increasingly attached to, and are reproduced through, powerful cultural institutions and industries ----all of them, in various ways, connected to big government and big corporations, which demand and reward conformity. In short, intellectuals are not outsiders always opposed to the status quo.
The responsibility of intellectuals is not only about taking positions on pressing social, economic and political issues, but it is also about advancing science in its various disciplines. Thomas Kuhn, the man associated with the notion of “paradigm”, discussed this phenomenon in the distinction he drew between what he called “normal science” and “scientific revolutions”:
....the very nature of normal science research ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for very long. Sometimes a normal problem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures, resists the reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the group within whose competence it falls. On other occasions a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails to perform in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot, despite repeated effort, be aligned with professional expectation. In these and other ways besides, normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does--when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice--then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science
Kuhn’s “normal science” are founded on paradigms that reflect relations of power in society – relations based on race, class, gender and other factors. Our continent, including our transition, is in need of scientific tools and models that speak directly to our reality and challenges; not those that are developed elsewhere to solve problems that have no relevance to us. We can learn from the example of Molefi Kete Asante who has spent years trying to develop a paradigm grounded in what he calls “afrocentricity”. The imperatives of relevance challenge our intellectuals to speak to members of the scientific community, to us, to them … to all of us!
Also, the scientific community cannot expect democracy from the state but be undemocratic in its internal practice - in its relations towards its members. Its mode of practice has to reflect the ideals that inform our Constitution such as transparency and honesty. It is discomforting that access to accredited academic journals and funding which is in private hands, for example, is in many ways still mediated by race, class and gender considerations.
Program Director,
This University and the many intellectuals who have found a home here can, like me, be inspired by wise counsel from women intellectuals who battled, like us, with the constant tension between freedom and responsibility. Two of these great women, Mary Bethune and Sonia Naidu, lived through the second half of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War. They were both socially and politically engaged – Bethune as an activist for the cause of African-Americans, and Naidu a prominent leader of the Indian nationalist movement. The third woman, Ho Xuan Huong, was a Vietnamese poet who lived between the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century and used her poetic license to attack the institution of patriarchy.
Ho Xuan wrote in her poem, “The Jackfruit”:
I am like a jackfruit on the tree.
To taste you must plug me quick, while fresh:
the skin rough, the pulp thick, yes,
but oh, I warn you against touching --
the rich juice will gush and stain your hands
In a word, we need the courage to face the consequences of our actions and, above all, for what we desire. Taking on challenges facing our country to reach our jackfruit will, inevitably, involve staining our hands.
Naidu, for her part, was in battle with her quest for freedom in her poem, “My Dead Dream”:
HAVE YOU found me, at last, O my Dream? Seven eons ago
You died and I buried you deep under forests of snow.
Why have you come hither? Who bade you awake from your sleep
And track me beyond the cerulean foam of the deep?
Would you tear from my lintels these sacred green garlands of leaves?
Would you scare the white, nested, wild pigeons of joy from my eaves?
Would you touch and defile with dead fingers the robes of my priest?
Would you weave your dim moan with the chantings of love at my feast?
Go back to your grave, O my Dream, under forests of snow,
Where a heart-riven child hid you once, seven eons ago.
Who bade you arise from your darkness? I bid you depart!
Profane not the shrines I have raised in the clefts of my heart
Finally, Programme Director, after listening to Ho Xuan and Sonia Naidu, perhaps Mary Bethune was right when she said: “Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth living”.
I thank you.
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