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Letter of the President
19 January, 2007
Viva the Cadres for Development!
For many years now we have insisted on the central importance of the struggle against poverty and underdevelopment in terms of creating the caring and humane society towards which our people aspire.
When we addressed the nation on the occasion of the Presidential Inauguration on Freedom Day, April 27, we said:
"Endemic and widespread poverty continues to disfigure the face of our country. It will always be impossible for us to say that we have fully restored the dignity of all our people as long as this situation persists. For this reason the struggle to eradicate poverty has been and will continue to be a central part of the national effort to build the new South Africa.
"None of the great social problems we have to solve is capable of resolution outside the context of the creation of jobs and the alleviation and eradication of poverty. This relates to everything, from the improvement of the health of our people, to reducing the levels of crime, raising the levels of literacy and numeracy, and opening the doors of learning and culture to all."
Following this, in our State of the Nation Address to the First Joint Sitting of the Third Democratic Parliament on 21 May 2004, we said: "At the core of our response to all [our] challenges is the struggle against poverty and underdevelopment, which rests on three pillars. These are:
The task further to accelerate our offensive against poverty and underdevelopment has now been raised in our 95th Anniversary January 8th Statement. In this Statement we have declared 2007 as "The Year to Intensify the struggle against Poverty as we Advance in Unity towards 2012".
In this regard, among other things the Statement says:
"In addition to our continuing task to defend our revolutionary gains, our central task during this phase of the National Democratic Revolution is to liberate our people from the scourge of poverty in all its manifestations, and eliminate all its offshoots...
"At the ANC's National General Council (NGC) in June 2005, the commissions on the Theory of Development reported that, 'the central challenge our movement faces in the Second Decade of Freedom is to defeat poverty and substantially reduce the level of unemployment. This means that the ANC and government must produce a coherent development strategy... identifying where we need to move to and what strategic leaps we need to get there'...
"Through our joint efforts as a nation we have built up momentum for stronger economic growth and development. But we need to act with even greater determination and focus to realise the potential of our economy to meet the needs of the poor in urban and rural areas. We need to act in unity, in a people's contract, to ensure that this progress is not only sustained, but elevated to a higher level during the course of the year.
"This places a responsibility, first and foremost, on the cadres of our movement, wherever they are deployed, in taking the lead in ensuring that growth is both accelerated and shared. Our key challenge is to sustain this growth, broaden participation in the economy and extend opportunities to all to deepen the quality of social development. Sustained and broad-based growth depends on additional progress in our industrial sector, on export growth and trade performance, and on improving education, skills and productivity.
"For those in government and in the legislatures, it requires that policies and programmes are effectively implemented and coordinated, continually monitored and evaluated, and always informed by the needs, interests and views of the masses of our people. It requires a mobilisation not only of the substantial resources and capacity of the state, but also the mobilisation of the most important resource within our communities - our people - behind this central task.
"Economic growth and development is at heart about empowering the masses to take control of their own lives, ensuring that they have the means and opportunity to enjoy the freedoms for which they have fought for a long time. They must therefore be an integral and driving force behind this effort. In this respect there is a clear role for participation by the non-governmental organisations and civil society structures. There is also a profound need for sustained cooperation between the government and its social partners - labour, business and civil society.
"We must therefore take care to ensure that all our policies and programmes involve the people in their design, implementation and evaluation. We must therefore work hard during the course of 2007 to ensure that forums exist and are effectively used to link government with the various stakeholders in our economy.
"In particular, we must focus on the involvement of the masses at a local government level. We should not take a purely technical approach to the development of the Integrated Development Plans (IDPs). The approach must involve communities in a meaningful way, and it must be used, additionally, to empower, educate and develop these communities.
"Government alone cannot resolve the challenges of inequality and poverty. Rather they require that we unite South Africans in a 'peoples contract to create work and fight poverty'. We must seek concerted action on our development approach, involving the whole of our society.
"As the RDP White Paper said, 'the birth of a transformed nation can only succeed if the people themselves are voluntary participants in the process towards the realisation of these goals they have themselves helped define'. It is therefore important to build a vibrant and continued integration between decision makers from the public-private and voluntary sectors and the intended beneficiaries of development - the people.
"And therefore in all our efforts as we advance with our mission to eradicate poverty we have to ensure continued participation of the masses of our people in the struggle against poverty...
"When it was formed, the ANC undertook the mission of forging the broadest front possible in the fight against white minority rule. Throughout its history, our movement has sought to organise and mobilise all social forces and organisations that share the broad vision of a democratic South Africa.
"Now that the reviled system of apartheid has been overturned, we should continue to seek the mobilisation of the broadest range of forces in society to overcome the poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment that continue to afflict many of our people.
"As we resolved at the 2002 Stellenbosch Conference of our movement, one of our key tasks for 2007 should therefore be to continue to work to bring together as many people and groupings as possible into a common struggle to build a better life for our people."
As the 1 March 2006 local government elections confirmed, the masses of our people continue to show the greatest confidence in our movement. These masses know from their own experience that their best hope for the achievement of the goal of a better life is to continue to entrust the governance of our country to their trusted representative and leader, the African National Congress.
As the January 8th Statement says, among other things, "This places a responsibility, first and foremost, on the cadres of our movement, wherever they are deployed, in taking the lead in ensuring that growth is both accelerated and shared...We must...take care to ensure that all our policies and programmes involve the people in their design, implementation and evaluation. We must therefore work hard during the course of 2007 to ensure that forums exist and are effectively used to link government with the various stakeholders in our economy."
All ANC cadres must therefore see and conduct themselves as Cadres for Development. This means that all of us must make a special effort to understand the practical actions that must be taken to accelerate our advance towards ridding our country of the twin scourges of poverty and underdevelopment. We must also strive to understand these practical actions within the context of the three broad areas we mentioned when we delivered the 2004 State of the Nation Address, namely:
Our provinces have now taken up the challenge further to deepen the political maturity of our members by systematically conducting political classes. To empower our members to discharge their responsibilities, enabling them to act as Cadres for Development, our provincial structures will therefore have to integrate the critical issue of the intensification of the struggle against poverty within their education programmes.
The issue of the involvement of our members in the struggle against poverty and underdevelopment as Cadres for Development will be particularly challenging at the local government level. This presents especially our Regional Executive Committees with the challenge to ensure that we develop a core of Cadres for Development in each of our local municipal areas.
In this regard, we must, once again, draw attention to what the January 8th Statement said, that: "As the RDP White Paper said, 'the birth of a transformed nation can only succeed if the people themselves are voluntary participants in the process towards the realisation of these goals they have themselves helped define'. It is therefore important to build a vibrant and continued integration between decision makers from the public-private and voluntary sectors and the intended beneficiaries of development - the people...In particular, we must focus on the involvement of the masses at the local government level...The approach must involve communities in a meaningful way, and it must be used, additionally, to empower, educate and develop these communities."
From this it is clear that the Broad Front for Development which the January 8th Statement calls for, will and must essentially be built from below. This task will therefore fall especially on the shoulders of our local leadership collectives and branches. Of enormous help in this regard will be the work in which our local structures are already involved - the Imvuselelo Campaign. Our success in this regard will give us the possibility to interact with our local communities and community based organisations in an effective manner. At the same time, our structures will have to interact in a correct and constructive manner with our Municipal Councils, Ward Committees and Community Development Workers.
Similarly, our cadres deployed in all three spheres of government, at both executive and administrative levels, will have to ensure that they respond in a serious and sustained manner to the tasks contained in the January 8th Statement. In this regard, among other things, this Statement says:
"For those in government and in the legislatures, it requires that policies and programmes are effectively implemented and coordinated, continually monitored and evaluated, and always informed by the needs, interests and views of the masses of our people. It requires a mobilisation not only of the substantial resources and capacity of the state, but also the mobilisation of the most important resource within our communities - our people - behind this central task."
Everything we have said points to the increased responsibility that rests on the shoulders of the elected leadership collectives of the ANC, from the National Executive Committee (NEC), to the Branch Executive Committees (BECs). These will have to ensure that they give the necessary leadership, guidance and support both to our comrades deployed in the governance structures, as well as those working in ANC structures.
As the January 8th Statement reminded us, when we celebrated the 95th Anniversary of our movement at the highly successful rally at Emalahleni in Mpumalanga, we also began the last five years that will end with our celebration of the Centenary of the ANC in 2012. We are determined to ensure that when we hold these historic celebrations five years hence, having significantly changed the lives of our people for the better, we will be able to say - 100 years after it was born, the ANC can justly claim that the ANC lives!, the ANC leads! Among the heroes and heroines we will celebrate on January 8th, 2012 will be those among our members who will have served as our Cadres for Development, in the interest of all the people of our country.
This page was last updated on Friday January 12, 2007