Land reform and land restitution are critical to the transformation of South African society and accordingly, the state will play a more central role in the land-reform programme ensuring that the restitution programme is accelerated, further contributing to the empowerment of the poor, especially in the rural areas, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.
Delivering his State of the Nation address at Parliament, Mbeki said that during 2006 the agriculture and land affairs minister will review the willing-buyer willing-seller policy; review land-acquisition models and possible manipulation of land prices; and regulate conditions under which foreigners buy land.
“This will be done in line with international norms and practices,” he said.
The minister and the department will also ensure that the land-redistribution programme is aligned to the provincial growth and development strategies (PGDS) as well as the integrated development plans (IDP) of municipalities, as well as attend to the proper use of the funds that have been made available for the productive utilisation of the land.
Housing corporation will finance poor
He went on to say that the country’s National Housing Finance Corporation will be transformed into a housing corporation that will provide finance to the poor and middle-income groups.
He said that this is part of the government’s effort “to help the poor to [gain] access [to] housing finance”.
“We expect our minister of housing and the leadership of institutions to reach final agreement without further delay on the modalities for utilising the R42-billion set aside by the financial institutions for housing development for poor and middle-income groups,” said the president.
This is “central to the attainment of a society free of shack settlements in which all our people enjoy decent housing”.
The government is known to be concerned about people in lower-income brackets who aren’t poor enough to gain access to state subsidised housing but who are not rich enough to easily obtain mortgage bonds from banks.
Mbeki said he also needed to mention that his government has decided that it must “completely eradicate in the established settlements the bucket toilets by the end of 2007”.
R372bn for ASGI, public works
Mbeki pledged total funding of R372-billion to support the government’s Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (Asgi) and the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) over the next three years.
Outlining the African National Congress’s plans to support economic growth, Mbeki said that, to implement Asgi, the state-owned enterprises and the public sector as a whole, working in some cases through public-private partnerships, will make large in various sectors in order to: meet the demand for electricity: provide an “efficient and competitive” logistics infrastructure: expand and modernise the telecommunications infrastructure and satisfy the demand for water.
He pledged that the public sector will also accelerate infrastructure investment in the underdeveloped urban and rural areas of South Africa through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant, the EPWP and other infrastructure funds to improve service delivery. This will include the provision of roads and rail, water, energy, housing, schools clinics, business premises and business support centres, sports facilities and multipurpose government service centres, including police stations and courts.
These are the programmes that will receive a total of R327-billion over the next three years, Mbeki said.
The government will pay particular attention to the EPWP as an important bridge between the “two economies”, Mbeki added, as well as a significant part of the ANC’s poverty-alleviation programme. Resources for the public works programmes will be pooled to ensure maximum impact, both in terms of products delivered and employment and skills training.
He also promised that the government will introduce better supervision of infrastructure projects, will ensure that its capital budgets were spent without roll-overs and that labour-intensive measures are prioritised, as well as skills training.
The Asgi has identified particular sectors of the economy to prioritise for accelerated growth, including business process outsourcing, tourism, chemicals, biofuels, metals and metallurgy, wood, pulp and paper, agriculture, clothing and textiles and the “creative industries”.
“In this regard, work is proceeding apace to address such challenges as the cost of telecommunications, and import parity pricing in steel and chemicals.
“We have already reached agreement with China to protect our clothing and textile sector. The second national telecommunications operator should become operational later this year.”
In the past year, the government has undertaken audits of a number of national government departments to assess their capacity to handle their responsibilities, to help accelerate social transformation, Mbeki revealed.
These have spanned housing, health, education and trade and industry. In all of these audits, the issues of skills, vacancies, delegation of responsibilities and relationships between national and provincial departments have emerged as the most critical areas requiring attention.
He pledged that the government will address these issues.
“We cannot allow government departments to become an obstacle to the achievement of the goal of a better life for all because of insufficient attention to the critical issue of effective and speedy delivery of services.”
Using local skills effectively
Mbeki said South Africa will establish “within a few weeks” a multi-stakeholder working group to respond to the country’s skills challenge.
He said the group will be called the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa).
Mbeki paid particular attention to the white, Afrikaans-based party the Freedom Front Plus, in its campaign to use the skills of unemployed, white, skilled workers.
While he did not refer directly to their ethnic status, he said he would like to “extend the sincere thanks of our Deputy President [Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka] and government as a whole to the response of the Freedom Front Plus and other formations and individuals who had responded to our appeal for South Africans with the necessary skills to make themselves available to provide the required expertise in project management and other areas”.
The Freedom Front Plus holds four seats in the 400-seat National Assembly and is led by Dr Pieter Mulder, a veteran MP.
Mbeki noted that the first group “of the 90 already identified and assessed will be deployed in their new posts in May”.
He said the government will make “other interventions in education and training. These include eliminating fees for the poorest quintile of primary schools, targeting 529 schools to double the mathematics and science graduate output to 50Â 000 by 2008 and re-equipping and financing the further education and training colleges”.
Mbeki noted that the government has completed the task of registering unemployed graduates, with more than 60Â 000 in the database.
“We wish to express our appreciation to the many companies that last December pledged to employ some of these graduates. An intensive campaign to link up these graduates with these and other companies will be undertaken this year.”
Mbeki said that what has been achieved since Nelson Mandela delivered his first State of the Nation address, “and what we can do, given the larger resources that have since been generated, has surely given hope to the masses of our people”.
“When he addressed the United Nations General Assembly 14 years ago on 18 February 1992, a mere two months after our nation established Codesa, the then chairperson of the United Nations special committee against apartheid said: ‘During the next few months, the special committee will need to closely monitor developments, in order to identify all factors threatening to derail the process in South Africa and to issue early warnings accordingly.
“‘We will thus pay particular attention to the underlying causes of violence. The level and the nature of violence continues to be extremely disturbing. More than 2Â 600 persons lost their lives in 1991 as a result of politically related violence.’
“Reading this today, wondering what could have gone wrong that so many people had to lose their lives needlessly, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that — yesterday was another country!” — I-Net Bridge