Speech by the Executive Mayor of Cape Town,
Alderman Patricia de Lille on the occasion of a full
Council sitting on Wednesday, 29 May 2013
Good morning, goeie dag, molweni,
Mr. Speaker,
It is now almost twenty years since South Africa began its journey with
democracy.
The country faced tremendous challenges.
We should be under no illusions.
Many of those challenges have been met.
In these latter days of our new country’s youth, when our feelings of
disappointment and futility sometimes seem overwhelming, we forget
what we have already achieved.
Millions of people have been given access to water and electricity.
Millions more have received the benefit of state welfare.
And the focus of the state was redirected away from war to broad-based
human development.
This is to say nothing of the human rights, the dignity, that we all enjoy.
But times change.
The challenges we once faced have not gone away.
The solutions we once thought would deliver us have resulted in
consequences for our population that could not have been foreseen.
Our changing times must be met with ideas of change.
And we must all have the courage to initiate a new era if that is what it
will take to answer the big questions that have been left hanging in the
air in recent times.
And there are many questions.
Why do international investors not regard South Africa as an attractive
destination anymore?
Why has the organised labour movement prioritised its own political
interests ahead of those of the workers they claim to represent?
Why does it seem like only a privileged few have benefitted from
empowerment?
Why does a heavily resourced education system continue to fail our
children?
Why have most young people given up hope of finding a job?
These are questions that can only be answered at the ballot box, not by
this Council.
But we must not think that these national issues do not play themselves
out here in Cape Town.
It is our cities and our towns that people are coming to in search of the
answer to these questions.
While the lives of the majority of the population have improved in the
past 19 years, that improvement has stalled.
As confirmed by Census 2011, where rural areas have collapsed and
people are desperate for jobs, only the city offers hope.
Where this Council does have influence is in attempting to make that
hope real for as many people as possible.
And so we are faced with a public policy issue: a structure of local
government that needs to adapt to cater for the social and economic
needs of a great many more people than it was designed for.
At its root, this is an issue of strategic organisational change to facilitate
multi-dimensional human development.
Before Council today is our solution for the organisation: The Economic
Growth Strategy and the Social Development Strategy.
They are two reports and two documents.
But they must be viewed as one, for social development and economic
development are two sides of the same coin.
You cannot speak of creating a city of opportunity for every one of you
have not planned for the needs of the most vulnerable.
And you cannot hope to permanently lift people out of poverty if you do
not attract job-creating industries and businesses that create the prospect
of employment.
There are numerous actors who must contribute to approaching these
problems: national government, which holds regulatory, financial and
legislative power; the provincial government; which provides core
services in education and health; and of course the private sector and civil
society, whose investment, financial and human, help drive change.
But we cannot neglect local government’s role.
We have the constitutional mandate to provide access to basic services.
But we also have the constitutional mandate to drive economic and social
development within our borders.
These strategies seek to marry these two imperatives and bring them
together.
They aim to help the organisation understand that everything we do
contributes to social or economic development.
For instance, the provision of electricity does not only mean that we have
provided a basic service.
Socially, allows people to have access to certain facilities that improve
their quality of life.
At the same time, electricity is a foundational building block of enterprise
and economic activity.
Combining that understanding, and creating the organisational change
that views the provision of basic services as fundamentally economic and
social endeavours, will be achieved by the two strategies.
The Social Development Strategy is structured around what the City does
and how it does it by mobilising resources for broad social development.
As such, it seeks to maximise income generating opportunities for people
who are excluded or at risk of exclusion, such as through EPWP projects.
It seeks to build safe households and communities, through our use of
security services and in our approach to both formal and informal
settlements and communities.
It creates the drive to support the most vulnerable by enhancing access
to infrastructure and services and, in so doing, foster social integration.
Its twin, the Economic Growth Strategy identifies what the City needs to
do in order to maximise benefits for the people of Cape Town while
ensuring that growth is environmentally sustainable in the long-term.
It does so by proposing institutional and regulatory changes that allow for
the building of a globally competitive city while utilising work and skills
programmes to promote growth that is inclusive.
Furthermore, it identifies how we leverage our trade and sector
development functions to maximum advantage with the right provision of
infrastructure.
These two strategies will complete the City’s full strategy package.
This package begins with the five pillars: the opportunity city; the safe
city; the caring city; the inclusive city, and the well-run city- the electoral
mandate.
At the departmental level, the five pillars have been incorporated into the
City’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP) which is, as per legislation, the
City’s strategic framework for this five-year period.
Complementing the IDP is the One Cape 2040 vision, which describes the
kind of city and region which we are trying to work towards in the longterm over a 30 year period.
And the One Cape 20140 vision is consistent with the overall imperatives
of the National Development Plan (NDP).
The IDP and the One Cape are, therefore, components of the same
strategy.
The IDP provides the programmatic details of the strategy while the One
Cape describes long-term goals to which the IDP, and other subsequent
IDPs, will work towards.
The ‘foundation strategy’ represented by the IDP and the One Cape is
supported by the Social Development and Economic Growth Strategies.
They combine and channel our short-term, medium-term and long-term
aims according to the IDP and the One Cape through the window of our
constitutional obligations.
In addition, they contain guidelines for additional activity that the City
and our partners need to do over and above departmental programmes to
achieve our social and economic goals.
These activities range from areas to focus on; goals to strategize for;
explanations of the government’s policy approach; and guidelines for
funding relationships.
Together, the IDP, the One Cape and the Social Development and
Economic Growth strategies form the basis of the City’s transversal
approach to strategy.
These two reports are complemented today by a whole raft of policies
that need to be considered by Council.
Specifically the policies that will further improve the work of the Social
Development and Early Childhood Development Directorate’s work need
to be considered today.
Furthermore, we are proposing an Events Policy that will help us reach
even greater heights in attracting global events to Cape Town.
And Transport for Cape Town will become a reality with the proposed
review of the macro-structure that will allow it to deliver on its mandate
and give life to the strategic intent of the National Land Transport Act.
Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I think that we all realise that South Africa
appears to be confronted with some difficult choices ahead.
But what is just as important as the choices is the courage to make a
decision.
As leaders, it is too easy to hold-off on making a decision, to do nothing.
By doing nothing, we reduce the risk of upsetting our political allies.
And by not making a decision, we in effect decide to serve our interests.
Not this government.
There is a future that we promised ourselves, of a people united and
working to create the kind of society where our children can expect to
have more than we did.
That future is not dead- it lives within us, within our decisions.
Cape Town makes the decision to adapt and change ourselves to deliver
even more for those who expect so much of us.
Cape Town decides to work for the future, no matter how hard it will be.
Thank you, baie dankie, enkosi.