SONA 2021: MANAGE THE PANDEMIC, CREATE MORE ELECTRICITY, FIX EDUCATION
STATEMENT BY BRETT HERRON, GOOD SECRETARY GENERAL
11 February 2021
South Africa is skating on very thin ice and we are desperately looking to this year’s State of the Nation Address for signs to reassure us that we have the means to avoid plunging through the surface to even colder depths.
In an extraordinary year of a pandemic, that has crippled an already struggling economy, and of continuing revelations of corruption, the most valuable commodity South Africans will be looking for from this year’s SONA is hope.
Hope that we have the planning and courage in place to emerge in one piece from shadows cast not just be the pandemic but also by years of mismanagement and unfulfilled promise.
We do not need anymore new empty promises. We just need to be told how and when the old ones will be implemented:
COVID-19:
A year ago, in response to the SONA debate, we said the situation the country was in required less talk and more action. We called for a year of implementation – and then Covid hit.
GOOD has an uncomplicated political view of the pandemic: It should not be politicised.
While some disaster regulations did not meet citizens’ universal approval, the bottom line is that, as a nation, we have largely followed the science. It’s a fast-moving foe, and we must continue to follow the science.
Parties that have politicised the disaster, such as Donald Trump’s Republicans and John Steenhuisen’s DA, have added to peoples’ anxieties and uncertainties.
Our own hope for this year’s SONA is for a vision of the new nation that must emerge after the pandemic, perhaps after the implementation of an effective vaccination programme, so that good people can begin to lay the foundations now.
We need the President to clear up the vaccination misinformation and confusion in no uncertain terms.
ENERGY & ELECTRICITY:
We have little hope of emerging out of this pandemic with strong potential to grow our economy and create jobs if we do not stabilise the supply of electricity.
Year-after-year we hear promises of increased generation capacity but load-shedding continues to sabotage our economy, and our day-to-day lives, and the promised turn-around never materialises.
Extra electricity capacity is readily available, and from clean and renewable sources, and we need a very clear and unambiguous commitment to procuring it fast and feeding it into the grid.
EDUCATION:
We have unacceptable levels of poverty and unemployment and unless we turn our education system around and start empowering school leavers with the necessary skills, literacy and numeracy to participate in a growing and new economy we are relegating millions of young South Africans to a life of poverty.
We need the President to produce the plans to meet the state’s constitutional duty to provide a proper and decent education to every child.
The massive discrepancy between the quality of education offered to children in this country is unacceptable and perpetuates inequality.
BASIC INCOME GRANT:
With an economy that fails to provide jobs and an education system that fails to provide the right skills needed by the job market millions of South Africans who should be in jobs are excluded from the economy.
When an economy cannot provide jobs and relegates millions of people to a life without access to any income then the country has a duty to support.
No person should be expected to live day-to-day, month-to-month and years on end without access to any income whatsoever.
The President has hinted at a Basic Income Grant and South Africa has studied the feasibility of this for decades.
The right to an income as a basic human right that is derived from the fact that we are human.
The short-term TERS grant must be converted into a permanent basic income grant.