Foreword by President Thabo Mbeki

I’m happy to write a brief foreword for this book, South Africa 2014.  As we are aware, together we have already begun the journey of the Second Decade of Freedom, and I trust that the contributions in this book would help us to build on the successes of the First Decade of Freedom and correct the mistakes that we have, as South Africans, committed in the last ten years.

I also hope that the contributions contained in this book would encourage all South Africans to work hard to ensure that, ten years hence, our nation would still be a nation at work in a country where the majority of the citizens would be enjoying a better and prosperous life.

Accordingly, to achieve a South Africa that is developed and prosperous we have a duty to cast our eyes into the future, not as some clairvoyants who have the power to foretell the future, but as practical, ordinary South Africans who are conscious of the fact that a better future for all our people would become a reality, if today we plan properly, adopt correct policies and consistently implement, without fail, all the policies.

Of critical importance is that to achieve this prosperous future, together as South Africans we should work on the pressing challenge of fighting poverty and underdevelopment in our country.  As we know, among the many anomalies that we have inherited is the fact that our country has one of the highest wealth gaps in the world.

In this regard, the challenge we continue to face in the Second Decade of Freedom, is to work together so that this country avoids a trajectory of increasing affluence of the few and deepening levels of poverty of the majority, with the rich and the powerful blind to the desperate deprivation of their poor and weak compatriots.

Together we should ensure that the South Africa of 2014 would have defeated the problems of lack of skills, unemployment, social dislocation and marginalisation.  We should work for the 2014 in which none among our people die because we are unable to prevent communicable diseases, because of an unhealthy environment or because our health infrastructure lacks the necessary capacity to deal with diseases.

We have it within our means to build a tolerant society that has triumphed over the legacy of racism; a society where our humanity unites us in our diversity; where our children play in gay abandon, free from the cancer of prejudice that poisoned the minds of many past generations of South Africans.

We need to march to 2014 being a nation that is driven by the ethos of Letsema and Vuk’zenzele – of solidarity with our compatriots, working together for a common good and taking initiatives to improve our lives rather than being solely dependent on a State machinery that some wrongly believe has unlimited resources.

Indeed, we should ensure that in these next ten years, we work together to uproot corruption in the public and private sectors and that all agencies that deal with the public do so in the spirit of Batho Pele – which is to say that in discharging our responsibilities we should do so driven by the understanding that service to the public is of paramount importance.

This book should inspire all of us to adopt an approach that says we can and should build an economy that surges forward, bringing into the mainstream economy millions of our compatriots who struggle to survive in what we call the Second Economy of our country, whereby these millions subsist on the margins of the developed and prosperous First Economy.

These compatriots, whose lives are that of hawkers, shack-dwellers, beggars, temporary workers and unemployed, are a direct challenge to South Africans to work harder so as to bring about a better life to all during the Second Decade of Freedom.

Further, as part of the African continent, we have a duty to ensure that our continental body, the African Union, succeeds in spreading and consolidating democracy on our continent and finds ways of helping the AU’s development programme, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) to succeed.  South Africa would never be truly prosperous if the rest of Africa exists in conditions of dire poverty and underdevelopment.

South Africa is privileged to host the Pan African Parliament, which is one of the practical ways indicating the African people are serious about the democratisation and development of the continent.  We should continue to do our best to ensure that we assist this continental parliament to discharge its mandate.

I am confident that there are many South Africans, black and white, who not only want to see our country achieve a better life for all, but who are also prepared to do whatever is necessary to help the regeneration of the African continent.  In this regard, we need to work together to build a movement of all these patriots to do practical things that would accelerate the development path on the African continent.

On the global level, the main challenge is to meet the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals and reform the multilateral institutions so that they can better serve the global community, including South Africa and Africa.  In the period towards 2014, we are confident that there will be encouraging progress on many of these matters.

I have no doubt that we will redouble our efforts to work together for the common good of South Africa, Africa and the world.  It is my hope that you, the reader, for your part, would engage the views presented in South Africa 2014 and that you would positively contribute to the great country and continent that we are together building.

28 October 2004