1. The vision that we will strive towards from 2005 to 2009
The South African Constitution includes a broad-ranging Bill of Rights. To illustrate the extent of the rights covered in this regard, let us consider the following extracts from the Bill.
- “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected. (10)
- Everyone has the right to life. (11)
- Everyone has the right to freedom of association. (18)
- Every citizen has the right to choose their trade, occupation or profession freely. (22)
- Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being. (24)
- Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing. (26)
- Everyone has the right to have access to:
Health care services, including reproductive health care;
Sufficient food and water; and
Social security, including appropriate social assistance. (27)
- Everyone has the right:
To a basic education, including adult basic education; and
To further education. (29)
- Everyone has the right to administrative action that is lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair.” (33)
The above section of the document has shown that the performance of South Africa (as a government, as a society, as a whole) in realising these rights has been uneven, but generally speaking, poor. More specifically, many more people now have access to sufficient water than was the case in 1994, and the coverage of the social security system is now much broader than was previously the case. However, we have seen that negligible progress has been made in other areas. Instead of progress there has been decline, especially in the former homeland areas of the country. The Bill of Rights refers to the right of every person to inherent dignity, yet a massive 89% of rural black people living in Ciskei and Transkei are dissatisfied with their lives. The vast majority of these people live in systemic poverty. The Bill of Rights speaks about the right of every citizen to choose his or her profession, but only 5% of Ciskeians and Transkeians over the age of 16 years old can find work, let alone choose their respective professions. And their salaries are very low. The Bill speaks about the right to education, but skills levels in the former homelands are so low that people have little chance of breaking out of poverty.
Over the past ten years, the government has implemented a range of discretionary programmes aimed at promoting rural development. By discretionary, we mean that government has conceptualised its interventions in such a way that it makes decisions about sectoral and geographic resource allocations. Simply put, government decides what money is spent on, and where it is spent. In this regard, government assumes the mantle of rationality and wisdom. It knows best, where people should live and how they should live. However, the implementation of government programmes has not halted, let alone reversed, the decline outlined above. Consequently, it is necessary that we pioneer alternatives to government’s discretionary approach as a matter of urgency.
The basis of the alternative that BRC proposes is that people have a right to a decent life (as outlined in the Bill of Rights) where they currently live. The most realistic way for our society to realise this over-arching right is to transfer decision-making responsibility for the allocation of public resources down to the lowest possible level, here understood to be the village. In order to realise the potentials inherent in this approach, it is necessary to set up the planning process in such a way that it has the following three key characteristics: it is participatory, it builds local institutional capacity and it is integrated. Once decisions have been taken, implementation can be driven by local institutions, leading to broad-based empowerment.
Consequently, our vision for the upcoming period is as follows:
The poor living in the former homelands of the Eastern Cape act decisively to improve their living standards through rights-based development. Such development is characterised by the following:
- Resources are brokered and leveraged in such a way that they are secured at local level.
- Planning and implementation is integrated (amongst other things, infrastructure and economic interventions must be complimentary).
- Local institutions take charge of planning and implementation processes.
Aspects of the strategic framework are as follows:
1.1 Securing resources at village level
1.2 Realising potentials through integrated planning and implementation
1.3 Building capacity at local level to take charge of development
|
