|
SPEECH AT THE WOMEN FOR HOUSING CONTRACTORS GRADUATION CEREMONY
Centurion
Lake Hotel
Master of Ceremony The satirical Ben Trovato, writes in one of his recent pieces that: ‘Men are genetically designed to leave a mess in their wake. Luckily, one of the spin-offs of evolution is that women are programmed to clean. This is why I know without a shadow of doubt, that George Bush is a real man. Just look at the mess that he is making. And when it comes to the final mopping up operation, I would not be all surprised to see half a million Washington wives flying into Baghdad with industrial vacuum cleaners, heavy-duty pot scourers and a stern warning to suicide bombers that they will be expected to clean up after themselves’. Even though Trovato expresses the value of women to the rest of human society in as mocking a manner as I quote here, and perhaps more seriously in as less an illuminating way about the true nature of the relationship between men and women - a relationship founded more on social conditions than on biological traits - my guess is that all of us here will agree with him. History too, in whatever way we look at it, is filled with a plethora of anecdotes reflecting the various ways in which women sought to clean the ‘mess’ that men continually make. And because this is true, because it is written in history, we have the evidence that women possess a kind of consciousness that makes peace possible, a consciousness that enables development, a consciousness that speaks justice and fairness. Even though their condition in human society continues to this day and age to be that of ‘a slave of a slave’ as was once strongly described by Frederick Engels in his Origins of the Family, women have a consciousness that in far greater degree expresses the value of human consciousness as not just ‘a part of the universal order of being’ as the philosopher Jean Paul Satre in Being and Nothingness sought to explain. As is shown by history their consciousness ‘constitutes the world and that order itself’. In South Africa, as women (black women in particular) we have a consciousness that constitutes our world dating back to some 500 years ago when in 1652 the seeds of racial and gender oppression were first planted on our shores. We thereafter lived through an entire century living through experiences where we were denied access to political power and had to endure systematic and often brutal forms of dispossession that were mostly meted out against us through the use of forced removals. Yet, despite harshly bearing these indelible scars through collective and individual efforts our spirit lived on. Our consciousness enabled us to live and to continue to tell the tales of our harsh experiences. It enabled us to live so that in the twilight of our years and the agency of our beings we can construct alternatives to achieve a free, non-racial, non-sexist democratic country. In a society that was severely split and damaged by apartheid the potency of our tales which have given us the consciousness I have described to you tell us how history is being made today with our participation. Nowhere is this more evident, for me, than in housing. In having been allocated only a mere 13% to utilize to build families as against an 87% of land that was allocated to white people; having been consigned to the Bantustans because we were not welcome to stay in designated white urban areas; having lived through pass laws; having lived through the exclusion of the industrial labour market, as Hilda Bernstein was to say in the book For their Triumphs and For their Tears, under apartheid African women were: ‘ . . . relegated to a position which had ever-spreading disadvantages. They were to fulfill their traditional role as bearers of children; they were to work on the land to supplement the low wages of the male migrants (only now they had to perform both their own tasks and those of the absent men). And they were to be denied the gradual access to paid employment that would normally have provided them with a new status in a changing society.’ Indeed, apart from job reservation which denied us training, upward mobility and apprenticeship, with the implementation of Bantu Education our disadvantages were spread further as the system of apartheid strengthened its hold in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, therefore the data that was released by Statistic South Africa in 2002 indicated in 36 million African people 15.3% had no education at all and that 21.5% only had primary education. The findings indicated that over a third had no numerical or language skills that they could use to successfully run a construction business. In the white population only 0.6% suffered this same fate. Again, in its report titled Earning and Spending in South Africa: Selected findings and comparisons from the income and expenditure surveys of October 1995 and October 2000, Stats SA indicates that in 1995 household income was unevenly distributed by population group and sex, as well as by urban and rural area of residence. African female headed households were generally earning and spending less than African male headed households, followed by colored female headed households and then colored male headed households. White male headed households were the most affluent in both 1995 and 2000. It thus clear that in a society that seeks to develop alternatives that will ensure fairness, justice and equity, that being agents of history it is this reality, amongst others, that we collectively need to pay attention to. Indications given in Census 2001 in respect of the construction sector bring this challenge even more to the fore for it is therein shown that whereas the employment of men in the sector was 470 909 at the time the employment of women totals 46 577. Still, even regardless of its own unsatisfactory performance, the informal sector is accredited with achieving the most results having employed by 2001 women estimated at 18 000 as against the figure of 206 000 for men. Because I believe that investments into housing are capable of sustaining a significant number of jobs directly it is critical that as women we collectively attend to this challenge. It is critical that we do so because housing programmes have too an important capacity to sustain jobs across the construction sector, the manufacturing sector, mining, agriculture and various others. Housing, with the participation of the construction sector in particular, also has the potential to raise foreign currency that is crucial to supplement local savings. The opportunities we have in this regard are plenty. For first, as government, we have a new housing strategy that incorporates all our experiences of the past ten years. In this regard, we have taken good advice that despite the good policies we have been implementing since 1994 – policies that have achieved the quantum results for which we are globally credited – some key supply-side mechanisms are not working to enable us optimally deliver. We thus heard and acknowledge how difficult it is to access land for new housing delivery; how the supply of new serviced land and housing stock is decreasing almost in contradistinction to increase in demand; that there is effectively no supply of old township housing stock into the market due to the effective absence of a secondary market; and how outside of the fully commercial housing market that operates mainly in former “white” areas, supply is thin because in part because of the relative unattractiveness of this segment for private developers; and lastly, how large construction companies withdrew from the state-assisted housing sector. We have listened and to cure all of this we removed the key bottlenecks in the housing delivery chain to create new opportunities for private sector participation in the housing programme. We increased and collapsed the subsidy bands; introduced a different arrangement for the funding of the acquisition of land; introduced plans and guidelines for companies to enhance and design new products; introduced a flexible arrangement to fund a rapid upgrading of informal settlements; developed a rural housing programme; expanded the role of the Department of Housing to cover the entire housing market; introduced new institutional arrangements to enable the integration of plans and processes; and earmarked municipalities for accreditation. Lastly, we also provided for the development and the building of the capacity of local contractors and targeted women empowerment in this regard. The effect that good policies have on delivery from the construction sector is indicated in a press statement released in December last year by the Bureau for Economic Research. This reads that: ‘The results obtained from the fourth quarter business survey conducted by the Bureau for Economic Research in the building industry confirm that the current overall recovery in the building cycle is now in full swing and broad based. Business confidence in the industry has now reached levels last seen in 1978/81. Building activity in the residential sector remains positive. The business confidence of contractors firmed further and no less than 96% of respondents polled were satisfied with current business conditions. The current favourable business environment is expected to continue during the first quarter of 2005.’ We have done all that we have done being guided by what needed to be done for the hard-core poor. We have crafted the policies believing that an improved environment for the private sector to participate in the government’s programme of action that is designed to end poverty delivering was the golden route to take. We have done so in order to have the private sector and the construction industry, in particular, help restructure our cities fundamentally to enable us to have a fundamental impact on both inequality and poverty. In addition, second, our economy, riding in part on the back of a resurgent global economy has never been in a better position. This has then given us favorable interest rates that decrease costs of borrowing including better exchange rates which help reduce the cost of imported goods and thereby production costs in the building and construction industry. We have, further, increased public investment into housing in line with the previous years, which all should go a long way into making into not only boosting the construction sector but also create opportunities for semi-skilled and unskilled people. The tale therefore that I would like us to continue to tell as women since this graduation is that our collective consciousness will propel us in the second decade of our freedom to play an even bigger role in advancing and creating new possibilities for our people. Having seen that despite all that we have done in the first decade of freedom that our people still continue to live under grinding poverty and continue to be surrounded by settlements that are not suitable for any human being to live in, I am certain that we will be sufficiently aroused to increase our efforts. In the second decade of our freedom we must be determinedly concerned to want to ensure that all our people experience the joy of living free and equal and that they ultimately find their dignity. I congratulate all of you for the determination you have shown to enlist in this sector where women are not relatively known. You have indicated that collectively we can remove the disadvantages that apartheid spread in our way as women. I am happy that I am your partner in this. I would like to encourage you individually to carve a niche in the field you have chosen for yourselves. Excel. Advance our cause. Be the carrier of our collective consciousness! Give your labor to give birth to a new society of hope; a society that spreads its advantages to all who live in it. Once we have done that, I am truly convinced, there will indeed be no mess to have to clean repeatedly throughout our history. I thank you
|