29 quotes found
"It is therefore important that as we put our vision to the country, we should do so directly, knowing that people out there want to be part of the process and will be responding, because in the end the drafting of the constitution must not be the preserve of the 490 members of this Assembly. It must be a constitution which they feel they own, a constitution that they know and feel belongs to them. We must therefore draft a constitution that will be fully legitimate, a constitution that will represent the aspirations of our people."
"This conference, with overwhelming agreement, unanimous agreement, has resolved that the expropriation of land without compensation should be among the mechanisms available to government to give effect to land reform and redistribution. It has also been resolved that in implementing this decision, we must insure that we do not undermine the economy, the agricultural production, and food security in our country."
"We now have a great opportunity to put land to good use, to take it out of those hands, lazy hands I might say, and put it into the working hands of our people."
"One of the other things that is going to help to give a boost to our economy is how we reform our state-owned enterprises. … The state-owned enterprises were sewers of corruption, a number of them. … There was rot, there was filth and there was deep corruption. We are rooting all that out right now."
"The last decade has seen many of the gains of the early years of democracy reversed through state capture and corruption, a failure of collective leadership, policy uncertainty and a growing distance between the people and their movement and their government. We have had to come to terms with the erosion of the values of the ANC and confront difficult questions about the quality and integrity of our leadership as the ANC."
"The manifesto had a paragraph on a wish and an aspiration, acknowledging that the Reserve Bank is independent and that there is no intention whatsoever to tamper or tinker with the independence of the central bank. The wish that is expressed is, that as it goes ahead with monetary policy machinations, it will keep an eye on employment."
"The independence, the standing and the role of the Reserve Bank is sacrosanct. It will remain independent, as clearly stated in our constitution."
"The US has been unable to imagine a better future that goes beyond four plus one G, where they have been unable to imagine what 5G has to offer. They are clearly jealous that a Chinese company called Huawei has outstripped them and because they have been outstripped, they must now punish that one company. We cannot afford to have our own economy being held back because there is this fight that the US is having."
"In Zimbabwe, I was booed by the whole stadium. I had to apologise to the people of Zimbabwe for the attacks. I do not want to call it xenophobic attacks. South Africans do not hate people of other nations. … We had to offer an apology on behalf of the people of South Africa. We are loved in the continent. We are a sought after country. … I had to apologise because those attacks were a national shame, …"
"They were saying Shangaans must leave [Ekurhuleni]. The Vendas must leave. The next thing they will say the Batswanas must leave. The BaXhosa must leave. Who is going to remain? ... We must defeat the demon of tribalism."
"The ANC has been the ruling in South Africa since the dawn of democracy in 1994. By the time Ramaphosa rose to speak [in his inaugural State of the Nation address on 16 February 2018], South Africa had experienced nine years of destructive and devastating rule by Jacob Zuma. To give hope to the broken nation, Ramaphosa, in his New Dawn delivery, invoked the lyrics of a song by struggle and music icon Hugh Masekela called Thuma Mina, or Send Me, in a desperate but brilliant effort to galvanise all South Africans to action to reverse the negative effects of the excesses of the Zuma presidency. […] He had struck the right chord with the nation and Thuma Mina instantaneously forced its way into the social and political lexicon of the rainbow nation. […] Hugh Masekela was immortalised."
"There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal."
"However, our primary focus must remain on the prevention of gender-based violence against the young girls and women of our country. Working with civil society and other partners across our society, we continue to call upon men and boys to stand at the forefront of changing attitudes and behavior."
"Just as we attained our freedom through the support and solidarity of many people and nations around the world, we continue to stand in solidarity with the victims of injustice in other parts of the world."
"As a people, our unity, determination and resilience has seen us through hard times. Just as this has been a year of great change, we look to the next year with great hope."
"Even though 2021 was a challenging year, the country demonstrated its adaptive and innovative spirit."
"Young people, of whatever time and generation, feel invincible. That’s important for necessary change"
"I would hope that at this point in time, our children do not have to die in order to bring about changes."
"This is where you can see that it is really necessary to open up and allow young people to play the role they want to play in providing leadership and solutions in society."
"We don't have a groundswell in a critical mass of countries that have allowed young people to take their rightful place. So something has to change in Africa, so that we do not have so many young people who are so desperate."
"It's important that at a school level, in a comprehensive way, that all young people are prepared for the world of work that they will graduate into. If we do not provide those skills, we risk leaving these young people behind, they will graduate and they will be inadequate for the future that awaits them."
""One of my big takeaways from young people is courage. The courage to sometimes walk where no one has ever walked. And I also think young people are not afraid to do the work — it's not as if young people are waiting to be saved. They want to save and deliver on the number of things that they feel strong about. So it is important that as older people, we don't treat them as people we have to carry, they actually will carry us I think. "thumb|Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka 2014"
"It is important that women celebrate themselves but also that they don’t only preach to the converted and go out there and win more allies for our struggle."
"The moral of the story there is that it’s important to be involved and be engaged. Being involved also showed to me the importance of having men as part and parcel of the women’s struggle."
"Well, it was women in the labour movement in the 1900s that gave us this day. They were calling for bread; they were calling for better working conditions and they were calling for peace. Guess what? We are calling for the same things today, in different ways. We are rededicating ourselves to the struggles of today. Today, for instance, we are calling for decent work because women continue to be at the bottom of the pyramid of economic activity and the work and the jobs that they do continue to be informal and to be low paid."
"We are also calling for women to be given equal pay for work of equal value, but also women still do a lot of unpaid work at home: caring for the aged, caring for children and that means that women cannot go out in the labour market and be part of the formal economy. So we are still, in a way, campaigning for the same thing. Women are campaigning for peace in countries where there is conflict. Women are campaigning against violence against women, which also means that where women have experienced domestic violence at home and outside the home they are not at peace with themselves."
"We also know that companies that involve women at a high level and engage them fully are much more competitive and profitable. As a matter of fact, amongst Fortune 500 companies, it has been argued that such companies are 34 per cent more competitive than their counterparts when it comes to returning profits to shareholders."
"The women’s movement has led the struggle, very bold, very courageous. But the change that is required– respect for human rights of women– is not just the responsibility of women alone. So we need to mobilize and to involve men."
"I think that it is important that women grab the opportunities that are there. Young women must stay at school much longer. They must delay having children until they can afford to have and look after them. They must be assertive and not be afraid to talk and to engage, because this world belongs to them just as much as it belongs to men."