Madam Speaker

When during a week-end you walk deeper among the mikhukhu of Lwandle, just outside Cape Town, your hair occasionally stands on ends. You feel like turning and running. Every other mkhukhu is a shebeen from which competing music blasts at full throttle. Every other adult moves or dances in a daze from all the noise and the obvious abuse of substances. You see in motion, massive attempts at escapism.

You see the toddlers in Lwandle playing in the filth and the squalor they cannot escape. Madam Speaker, these are our people. The speech by the president and the optimistic figures and statistics contained therein ought to have meaning to them. He is their President. But did it have meaning to them? Did it have any meaning that the economy gathered momentum in the third quater of 2000 and that the consumer inflation rate was 5,3 per cent last year as compared to 15,3 per cent in 1991?Probably not. 

And that is not because it is high-flown erudite stuff. It is because the divisions in our society are still such that a boon for one section is at best a non-event for the other. It is because those optimistic figures and statistics had no tangible, visible and obvius impact on their immediate and material condition. This Madam Speaker, once more emphasises the enormous amount of work we face in our country. It is a hard enough challenge to grow the economy, but in our case, you still have to ensure that the fruits of that economic growth are distributed in a manner that benefits the people of Lwandle as much as those of Sea Point and Constantia.

Also, the fact that the street kids you find everwhere in the cities of our countyr are of one colour; that the images of cholera on TV screens are Black and that all the people of Lwandle and other places of a similar description are Black, means that our quest for an equal and integrated society as envisioned by the constitution does not yet exist. But because we don't want intergration in the gutter, or equality in the diarrhoea and dehydration of cholera, or solidarity in the squalor of Lwandle, we should devote special attention to the eradication of the legacy of centuries of oppression which is so manifest in the Black Community.

The line in the speech of the president that talks about moving the economy onto a high-growth path, raising employment levels and reducing poverty and persistent inequalities, needs to inform and drive almost everything we do. That high-growth path of economic growth must go through Lwandle, Nongoma, Nzhelele, Dinokana, Mankurwane and Botshabelo, so that the economic figures and statistics of the future can increasingly begin to talk to us as well.

MOSIBUDI MANGENA

14 February 2001