We don’t believe that the fabric of South African society can tolerate mediocre State management for much longer before ripping apart.

Nor do we believe that in order to fix South Africa we have to re-divide it, which is the essential position of many in the opposition benches.

What we need is a cohort of capable leaders steeped in the human values of humility, integrity and community. 

The President is correct that South Africa, today, is fundamentally different to that of the apartheid-era. 

Nobody can seriously deny the existence of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, our democratic institutions, independent judiciary and free media. 

These instruments have been used by political parties, and citizens, across the spectrum to hold the State to account.

The quandary we have is that despite the gains we’ve made – subsidised housing, electrical and water connections, and social grant system, included – about one in three South Africans are living in extreme poverty. 

Our efforts to right the wrongs of the past, from land dispossession and spatial injustice, to prosecuting apartheid and post-apartheid state criminals, have proven feeble.

Our constitutional values, which the President correctly said we should celebrate, impose a duty on the state to rectify our inherited injustices, and forge unity between our historically divided people.

What we don’t need is to throw our post-apartheid values out with the bathwater. We need to create space for more babies in the bath.

If we are unable to eliminate poverty and inequality by fixing the economy and thereby creating jobs, the State has a duty to do so through social security.

The President introduced us to Tintswalo as a symbol of a young South African nourished by the fruits of democracy.

Bongeka Buso, from Butterworth, on the other hand, murdered her three children last August before killing herself. She was 38-years-old. She was driven to desperation by poverty; by the failure of the state to meet its Section 27 obligations to provide social security.

The President’s failure to commit the state to implementing a basic income grant, for the 12 million unemployed adults who qualify for no other social grant and cannot find a job, was very disappointing. 

As poverty becomes increasingly entrenched, the state must implement a basic income system that, at least, meets the lower bound poverty line.

South Africa will be unable to create jobs for as long as we are trapped in an economic growth crisis. 

We need an annual growth rate of 5% or 6% to seriously address the crisis of unemployment when our population growth rate has exceeded 19% over the past decade.

We need the basics for growth: stable and reliable electricity, functioning transport networks and functional digital communications connections.

We welcome the President’s commitment to adding renewable energy to the grid, but the IPP procurements have been bogged down in long processes that bizarrely don’t recognise any urgency.  

The 2020 Risk Mitigation IPP, to urgently add 2000MW to the grid by end-2022, was barely off the ground in November 2023, with just five projects totalling 353MW under construction. 

We also welcome the President’s strong commitment, or recommitment, to the green economy and a just transition.

In 2010, government adopted “The New Growth Path Framework” which recognised the “green economy” as a key driver that could create at least 300 000 jobs.

Fourteen years later it would have been good to learn about practical steps to begin re-skilling coal workers, and to localise the production of components for the renewable energy industry, for example.

South Africa’s National Infrastructure Plan was gazetted, by the previous Minister of Public Works & Infrastructure, in February 2022, identifying a number of Strategic Infrastructure Projects (SIPs) across the energy, freight transport, water infrastructure and digital communications sectors ready for implementation.

But government-led infrastructure projects have been slow in implementation and the construction sector, which could be a key driver of job creation, has been contracting. 

Mr President, we need one coherent economic growth plan to address our worsening economic growth crisis, and provide for inclusive growth for all South Africans and for black South Africans who were left behind (where black is as defined in the Employment Equity Act and the BBB-EE Act as a generic term which means Africans, Coloureds and Indians).

Without inclusive economic growth the democratic values and freedoms South Africa has achieved will be overshadowed by suffering on a magnitude that betrays those values and our constitution.