GOOD Speech by Patricia de Lille,
GOOD Leader
16 March 2024
Note to editor: This speech was delivered today by GOOD Leader Patricia de Lille at the launch of GOOD’s 2024 Election Manifesto in Johannesburg.
Welcome to my fellow South Africans,
We are here at Liliesleaf farm to pay tribute to our heroes and heroines of the struggle against apartheid. We owe it to them and we call on the public to support Liliesleaf and hold events here.
Now I turn to the manifesto….
We can stop the suffering
South Africa is not a poor, or second-rate, country.
We have a combination of natural beauty, natural resources, human ingenuity and resilience that is the envy of many other nations on our continent, and in the world.
For 350 years, colonialism and apartheid stripped the majority of our people of their land, livelihoods, dignity and humanity.
Thirty years ago we said the injustice and the suffering must stop.
We negotiated a progressive constitution, elected a rock star of a President, and set out on a fundamentally new path of equality, fairness, inclusivity and nation-building.
Parliament rolled up its sleeves and chucked out discriminatory laws.
Millions of subsidised homes have been provided to families in need, millions of people have been connected to basic services, and we’ve built hundreds of new schools and clinics.
But, while the lucky few among us live good qualities of life, millions of our people continue to suffer.
Continue to occupy the margins of society where apartheid spatial planning dumped them. Continue to be ground down by hardship and dwindling hope.
The fruits of democracy are yet to be tasted by them.
One in six of us ekes out a living on R350 a month… nearly one in two of our youth can’t find jobs… instead of reimagining our spatial framework, and bringing people closer together, we have extended the Group Areas Act ghettoes and developed new ones…
There are no jobs for our youth people, but an endless supply of drugs – and any number of alcohol outlets
Our women and children are not safe in their homes, not on the way to school or to buy a loaf of bread, not in a taxi, and not at the mall.
The rate at which our women are killed by intimate partners is five times higher than the global average.
Justice, reconciliation, redress
Thirty years ago, most South Africans embraced a new set of values: Common decency, common sense, common justice and common purpose.
The new nation rested on a delicate balance of acknowledgement, redress for apartheid suffering and injustice, and nation-building.
Through acknowledging past suffering, and lifting up those who were forced to their knees, we would build a resilient and sustainable country.
At the same time as the country was making the political and administrative transition from the old order to the new, it was under immense pressure to transform society – socially, economically, spatially and environmentally.
Many political commentators today are guilty of overlooking the gravity of the task, a tall order for any society.
The key instrument we created to smooth the transition was the Truth And Reconciliation Commission.
Instead of granting a blanket amnesty to apartheid-era killers and torturers, they had to make a full confession to the commission, demonstrating they had acted with a political purpose.
When the commission concluded its business, its report to the President recommended hundreds of prosecutions of those who didn’t meet the requirements for amnesty.
It also recommended a series of measures to address inequality, including a wealth tax, to contribute to stopping the suffering inherited from the past.
The recommendations were important because they underscored the principle of accountability.
But because the ruling party fell out with the commission it buried the report.
Not implementing the recommendations severely set back the principles of accountability, and social and economic justice.
The nation-building project that characterised the Mandela presidency was effectively abandoned… replaced by impunity.
This was a critical turning point for our country.
The GOOD Manifesto: Our recipe to re-balance society
When I visit communities, in Tshwane or Cape Town or Durban, and see the way people live, with no food in their cupboards, children with sores, without joy or hope for anything better, I feel angry and ashamed.
You can’t build a stable country on foundations of injustice and inequality.
We should have done much better.
The GOOD Party was established in 2019 because the need for viable alternatives to the old parties was obvious.
Most South Africans are good people who would like to contribute to fixing their country.
They know that evil prospers when good people do nothing, and needed a comfortable platform to make the difference they would like to see.
GOOD is a social democrat party. South Africa doesn’t need either a strong private sector or a state-regulated economy: We need both.
Thriving businesses create jobs, but if there is to be economic justice we also need the state to drive the process to reduce inequality, indignity and poverty.
Over the past few years, at local, provincial and national levels of government – and in the Cabinet – GOOD people haven’t tried to shout the loudest or make the most radical statements.
We have instead strived to be the most pragmatic and constructive opposition we can be, including demonstrating the rare ability in South African politics of being able to contribute to municipal coalition governments led by both of the old parties.
The GOOD Manifesto is our recipe to re-balance society.
The Manifesto doesn’t offer free flights to the moon, or a wish-list for Father Christmas.
Nor is it based on negativity towards any group of citizens, on vengeance, or hatred.
The promises other parties are making won’t materialise on 1 June. They won’t materialise until the structure of government changes… the same structure that has struugled to deliver to the nation’s satisfaction.
If we don’t change the structure it will amount to no more than changing the positions of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
We have created a bureaucracy of note, largely modelled on control systems borrowed from northern nations that are differently cultured, differently trained and differently paced to us.
There is much we can learn from them.
But to simply take their template and apply it to our civil service isn’t necessarily the most comfortable fit.
Our structure must change, based on our own circumstances and needs, to improve our efficiencies. And it must be professionalised.
This will free up funds that can be invested in marginalised people and communities.
We don’t need new plans every five years.
We can have the best plans in the world but they aren’t worth the paper they’re written on if they’re not implemented.
Government has put some good plans on the table over the years.
The question it needs to answer is why – with budgets approved by parliament – it hasn’t done what its own policies say it should have done?
GOOD’s Manifesto rests on four robust pillars: Social Justice, Economic Justice, Spatial Justice and Environmental Justice.
Our Secretary-General, Brett Herron, will later take you through some of the detail.
It is my task to set out some context, and answer the question millions of South Africans are grappling with: Who do I trust sufficiently to lend my vote on 29 May?
Gender and identity
The face of poverty and suffering in South Africa is that of a woman of colour. If she has a job besides raising children, which is not regarded as “real work”, she likely earns less than men do.
If you look closely you may see the scars she bears of the plague of gender-based violence.
Because of our history, issues of gender and identity are not boxes that simply require ticking in election manifestos… They speak to the heart of a society’s posture about itself, and its level of self-esteem.
Gender and identity equality cut across all four of GOOD’s pillars of justice. In 2019 GOOD was the only women-led party to win sets in parliament.
I’m used to being outnumbered – though never outmuscled – by men.
In 2004 I was the first woman in the country to lead a party represented at all three levels of government.
I don’t need to tell you that women are generally more emotionally developed than men.
Perhaps it has to do with our maternal instincts, but we seem to be more compassionate, more empathetic and less driven by personal greed.
It is stating the obvious to say that the levels of inequality, consumptiveness and destruction in the world have occurred under the almost exclusive leadership of men.
There’s a deficit of good leaders, men and women, across the world
According to the World Economic Forum, women in South Africa still earn 23-35% less than men for the same work. This contributes to the under-valuation of women, which is a major driver for toxic masculinity in our country.
Two years ago, on Women’s Day, GOOD invested in an online and radio-based campaign to encourage women and girl survivors of abuse to break the culture of silence and make their voices heard.
We called the campaign: Don’t Shut Up – Speak Out. Our materials have been engaged by upwards of 12 million people, and we have quietly been able to contribute to hundreds of victims rising back to their feet.
GOOD has invested more than R300 000 in the campaign.
When we say we have a zero-based approach to sexual misconduct, we don’t just write it in our manifesto.
When our own male members are accused of misconduct we don’t dither with integrity committees and such like; we convene disciplinary hearings, according to our constitution, and if we find them guilty we chuck them out.
We equally have a zero-based policy to homophobia.
Once again, we don’t just say it, and condemn homophobic violence when it provides a convenient platform, it is an embedded value that cuts across all four pillars of justice.
We didn’t set up a LGBTQI+ desk in order to include it in our manifesto.
We did it because we understand that to exclude people based on their colour, culture, religious belief, gender or sexual identity is crude and repulsive.
We say: You don’t need to be a black person to fight racism, you don’t need to be gay to fight homophobia, and you don’t need to be a women to fight against gender equality.
Palestine
We condemn violence committed against civilians by the State of Israel and Hamas, but we are very clear on the rights of Palestinians to struggle against Israeli apartheid because, as South Africans, we recognise their suffering.
We remember the injustices of forced removals, the curtailment of peoples’ free movement, and the way the boers corroded our dignity…
We say very clearly that we are not against people of the Jewish faith, but we are firmly against the exclusionary and discriminatory policies of the Zionists running Israel.
We are revolted by the injustice of the genocide against the people of Gaza, and by the fact that unfair and imbalanced world power relations permit it.
We demand an immediate ceasefire, and call on the UN to implement its own resolutions on the establishment of an independent state of Palestine alongside an independent state of Israel.
We commend our government for the principle of taking Israel to the ICJ.
Poverty
The extent of poverty threatens to dismantle all the technical gains we’ve made since dismantling apartheid.
The fact that nearly nine million of us are so severely poor as to qualify for the R350 SRD grant, and that we can’t look to the economy to release the pressure by generating jobs, is our Number One Crisis.
The fact that the R350 is less than half of what an adult needs just to feed him or herself is a recipe for disaster.
If the economy cannot provide for the people’s basic needs, the Constitution provides, the responsibility falls to the State.
The present suffering of our people demands the implementation of a Basic Income Grant.
The fact that the economy is not creating enough jobs is not the fault of poor people.
A good government would implement a Basic Income Grant of a minimum of R999 a month to all unemployed people.
This, again, is not an election slogan.
We have been campaigning for the introduction of a BIG for more than a year. We didn’t pull the R999 figure out the air, either.
The number was informed by independent economic research on affordability to the fiscus.
We can afford a BIG through a combination of restructuring government, increased efficiency, professionalising the public service, cutting out corruption, and some tax reforms. Corruption steals directly from the poor.
GOOD used its own money to test the impact of people receiving R999 a month.
We launched a pilot micro-entrepreneurship project last year.
We used R50 000, which we then distributed to 50 individuals in Gauteng, the Western Cape and Eastern Cape.
Each participant had to present a business plan on how he or she would spend the R1000 to build a livelihood.
Some bought socks, some bought cleaning products etc.
The R1000 enabled them to purchase initial stock, which they could sell and make sufficient profit to buy more stock as well as keep some living expenses on the side.
The initial results have been very pleasing.
It is a demonstration of what the State could be doing, at scale – but isn’t – to switch on thousands of new entrants to the economy.
We challenge other political parties to consider using some of the funding they get from the fiscus to assist the unemployed and poor rather than using it all on billboards and posters to get themselves re-elected.
We all have a responsibility to build our country, and fixing the economy won’t happen overnight.
The bottom line is that we need to apply ourselves to the macro challenges, such as electricity supply, without neglecting the micro needs of the millions who have been stripped of their dignity over decades and centuries.
We need to make South Africa a comfortable place for the middle-class to live in, and do business, but not at the continuing cost of the poor.
Spatial justice
Our progress to undo the injustice of land dispossession and forced removals has been too slow.
Instead of building subsidised homes in good areas, and taking the opportunity to integrate communities, the vast majority of the subsidised homes we have built have been miles from town and job centres, perpetuating apartheid spatial planning.
In rural areas, land reform has proved piteously slow, and a number of celebrated community restitution projects have failed.
The state has significant land holdings, including farms.
All three spheres of the state should employ its land holdings for land redistribution purposes through housing and farming projects.
Public land must be used for public good.
A good government would order the release of well-located land suitable for affordable housing, and prioritise the development of higher-density, mixed-income, mixed-use, rental homes in the inner city.
To address the reality that most of our people live many miles from work, and can ill-afford to spend the crumbs they earn on expensive public transport, opportunities must be developed to bring jobs closer to them.
For example, more government department buildings can be built in poorer areas.
GOOD is particularly concerned about the rise of homeless people, and the inadequacy of the State’s response.
Many of us who drive past the tents and hokkies in town don’t appreciate how desperate these peoples’ circumstances were at home to drive them onto the streets.
Homelessness can’t be arrested, deported to other countries, or buried.
The state, at all its levels, must provide suitable temporary housing for people experiencing homelessness, combined with proper health and support services, until permanent housing is arranged.
Giving people a temporary bed at an uncomfortable shelter, and then pushing them back onto the streets, prolongs their suffering.
As a strategy, it lacks compassion, humanity and any sense of justice.
Ethics and ethical leadership matter
If there’s one line that is common to the election manifestos of all political parties it must be the one about not tolerating corruption.
It’s nice to say, but evidently not so easy to deliver.
I take pride in my reputation for not tolerating any nonsense.
It is a reputation acquired in the school of hard knocks of the apartheid-era labour movement.
I can be that Aunty Pat with the gracious smile and best recipe for pickled fish, but when the boxing gloves are called for I’m known for swinging right into action…
Public representatives who steal money that could be spent improving the lives of the poor are not public representatives.
They are thieves who must be set to prison, not to parliament.
When I blew the whistle on the corrupt arms deal in the late 1990s I wasn’t solely motivated by political desire to damage the ruling party’s reputation, but by values – that most of us share – about what is right and what is wrong.
Later, when Mayor of Cape Town, obtaining a string of clean audits was an important moral obligation and ethical principle.
At the Department of Public Works, I took a scalpel to malfeasance I inherited.
When corrupt civil servants under my watch tried their tricks, procuring the erection of a fence at Beit Bridge, I called in the Special Investigations Unit.
The officials found to have irregularly awarded the contract were suspended, and the court later ordered that all profits from the project be returned from the contractor to taxpayers.
When I moved across to Tourism, among my first actions was to put a stop to the crooked Tottenham Hotspurs misadventure, saving the country R1b.
The blue liars, who incidentally accepted five ambassador posts to serve the ANC government, say my accepting a position in the Cabinet means GOOD has been captured by the ruling.
By this twisted logic, their fellow travellers to the moon, the IFP and FF+, have also been captured because their leaders, too, served the country in Cabinet.
Not to mention the fact that their own leader said recently he accept a position in Cabinet were it offered.
The difficulty he has is that a huge part of the trouble South Africa finds itself in is the product of a one trick pony of an official opposition that for decades has added nothing constructive to fixing the country.
Good opposition requires more than opposing everything in sight, while gleefully attributing all our woes to black incompetence and corruption.
Weaponising allegations of corruption doesn’t move us forward; the allegations must be swiftly investigated, and the crooks held to account.
GOOD would like to see South Africa implement much stronger measures to defend whistle-blowers – not only those in the ranks of the civil service, but also in the private sector and in our communities.
We must protect, incentivise, and reward whistle blowers.
In a society of criminal impunity, where those who break the law often do so in the secure knowledge that they won’t get caught, whistle-blowers should not only be protected; they should be treasured.
Switch to GOOD
South African have the power and the responsibility to stop the suffering.
The process begins by sending people with integrity to parliament.
People who are not in the game to enrich themselves, or play different groups of us off against each other.
People with a vision of developing the fair, just, inclusive and united country that many of us fought hard to achieve.
A sustainable country, at peace with itself.
We welcome the fact that our politics is maturing.
We are exiting the immediate post-apartheid era of old party dominance that has not served the country well.
We call on South Africans to invest their votes wisely, in people with values, principles and the genuine desire to build a country in which all its people feel at home.
Please use the opportunity the Constitution affords you on 29 May to chart a new course to prosperity than can only come through acknowledging our inter-dependence as fellow South Africans and the unfinished business we began in 1994.
We can stop the suffering.
Ends…
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Janke Tolmay, GOOD Media Manager
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Email: janke@forgood.org.za