STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESS 2004
Imbizo: govt, people interface
Thabo Mokgola
6 February 2004
President Thabo Mbeki says the government's Imbizo programmes have given ordinary South Africans an opportunity to gauge government's performance over the last decade in an unmediated manner.
Mbeki was delivering his annual state of the nation address in Parliament on Friday.
President Mbeki said the Imbizo process had given government an opportunity to hear directly from South Africans what statistical figures detailing the government's performance meant to them.
"It has been truly inspiring to hear directly from the people as they expressed their concerns, communicated their aspirations and made suggestions of what needs to be done to take us further forward to meet the needs of the people", Mbeki said.
"These masses, essentially, but not exclusively, the poor of our country, invariably speak well of the improvements to the quality of their lives that have occurred during the last 10 years", he said.
So far, the Imbizo
programmes have taken the President to seven provinces. Deputy President Jacob Zuma has also visited some provinces, including Limpopo and Mpumalanga.
Imbizos provide communities with an opportunity to interact with high-level government officials without any bureaucratic mediation.
These people, Mbeki said, have not hesitated to make frank and critical assessments, especially of the quality of service delivery in their localities, as well as the performance of their municipal councillors.
They also boldly raise questions related to crime, health and instances of perceived or actual corruption and malpractice.
"On Thursday last week we were at Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal", Mbeki said. "One of the participants at the imbizo complained that though people had cellular phones in this rural and mountainous area, they could not use them.
"He explained that this was because the cellular phone companies had not erected the necessary masts."
The
President's office immediately contacted Vodacom and informed them of the complaint. "I am very pleased to say that two days ago one of the local leaders at Msinga called to say that the service providers had come to the area within hours to attend to the complaint.
"In less than a week, the people of Msinga had been given the possibility to communicate among themselves and with the rest of the country and the world by telephone."
On the last leg of his KwaZulu-Natal imbizo, at Gamalakhe near Harding in the Ugu district municipality, a local resident drew President Mbeki's attention to instances of corruption in prisons.
"He then gave us details of his experience of this corruption," Mbeki said, adding that they had been passed on to Judge Thabane Jali, who heads the judicial commission currently investigating malpractices in the correctional system.
Within days of receiving the information, Judge Jali had already instructed people assisting him in
KwaZulu-Natal to meet the complainant and follow up on his allegations.
The government, Mbeki said, took the imbizo process very seriously, and tried at all times to respond to the issues raised by the people, within the context of the availability of resources.
The imbizos, Mbeki said, "defied the apartheid era myth that intimidated people not to communicate with their leaders.
"I have listened to our people boldly expressing their views even in areas that, not so long ago, were paralysed by the fear that to speak one's mind was to invite death.
"This has said to me that we have moved forward most significantly towards the realisation of the objective presented by President Mandela when he committed us to the continuous extension of the frontiers of freedom."
Source: BuaNews
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