Speech delivered by MEC for Health and Welfare Mr. Seaparo Sekoati on the occasion of Auxillary Nurses' Certificate Award Ceremony Hoedspruit Air Force Base

17 November 2004

Programme Director
Executive Mayor and Mayors present here
Councillors
Government Officials
Parents and Graduates
Honoured guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

We are gathered here during this noble and august ceremony to celebrate the achievements of our auxiliary nurses. They have come along way to be here and it is therefore befitting that we should rejoice with them on their achievements.

The dawn of democracy in our country in the past ten years has ushered in an opportunity for all of us to pursue the goal of creating a better life for all. When we started ten years ago, there was a lot of pessimism and it was not easy as such.

However tremendous progress has been achieved, hopes raised, and the majority of our people refused to subject themselves to misery.

Notwithstanding this progress huge challenges of poverty, unemployment and socio-economic inequality persist and therefore call for a multi-pronged approach.

Indeed despite the constraints and regardless of the accumulated effect of this historical burden, we must seize the time and define for ourselves what do we need to do in order to determine our shared destiny.

As we attempt to navigate these troubled waters, as we did in the past ten years, we must be inspired by the single vision of creating a society that is people –driven and people- centred.

Driven by this ideal, government came up with programmes, created institutions and adopted various pieces of legislation, all geared towards realising the objective of creating a better life for all.

Having done all these things, today, as we are gathered here, we must ask ourselves whether we have succeeded or we are succeeding, as the former President Mandela once said during his first address to the first session of the first democratic parliament, “to expand the frontiers of human fulfilment, to continuously extent the frontiers of freedom.”

This should be the acid test of the legitimacy of the work that we have been doing to indeed push back the frontiers of poverty.

The past ten years have been characterised by the pursuance of all appropriate means of eliminating the ravages of poverty amongst our people.

Most hard-hit in this situation of poverty, have been women, with least access to food, health, education, training and opportunities for employment and other needs

These many years of discrimination against women has had an effect of impairing and nullifying the recognition, employment and exercise of fundamental human rights and freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural and other fields.

For many of our people, especially, rural women, children, the aged and the disabled, the ideal of a better life for all was little more than a promise they appreciated but could not be fully realised.

Having appraised and appreciated the fact that the social problems facing our country in general and province in particular are disparities in income distribution, poverty, and unemployment, government developed the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Programme through which relief measures would be provided to vulnerable groups who cannot afford adequate and nutritious food due to poverty.

Through this programme poverty - stricken households are earmarked to benefit over a period of three months.

As a result of this programme food parcels to vulnerable households and agricultural starter packs to enable self-food production were distributed. This was complemented by enhanced registration of social grants.

In order to contribute to this national effort, our department evolved the programme to train auxiliary nurses, who will also help reduce the dire need in health personnel in our clinics particularly.

Through this programme we have sought to provide education and pre- employment training and opportunities to combat social exclusion.

Indeed we are succeeding to develop employability and facilitate access to work for many of our young people.

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It is our view that while on training you were provided with the minimum requirements to function productively in our health institutions.

The technical competencies, knowledge and innovativeness that you have mastered are the ingredients for poverty eradication and economic growth. They are important for the upliftment of our indigent families and communities and their integration into the mainstream of society.

Your training included work familiarization and practical experiences designed primarily to prepare you for work.

We are hopeful that you will be able to smoothly and skilfully transit from your training institutions to your actual areas of employment.

Through this training an opportunity has been created for career paths and the likelihood of several career changes during your working lives.

We urge you to improve on your performance so that you can enrol for other programmes relevant to your work.

At the same time we appeal to you, as your skills and experience improve, not to leave our country and province in search of greener pastures in western countries. Your patriotic duty lies in providing services to the people of this country. After all they have invested a lot in you.

We value and need you because your availability as highly skilled and qualified health professionals is an essential prerequisite for increased efficiency and improved performance in our institutions.

At the same time education and access to it therefore, contributes directly to reducing poverty and increasing social equity.

As government, we will maintain this strategy for sometime in order to further reduce poverty and establish a solid basis for continued efforts to resolve the structural problems that afflict our society.

We will continue to assign high priority to reduce poverty in the rural areas where the majority of the poor live. We will give more priority to the questions of raising the people’s standards of living as the basic goal of our development efforts.

To accomplish this we will have to create more jobs, increase personal income, distribute income more equitably, improve the social security system through the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) and ensure a more comfortable life for our people.

As you go out to discharge your responsibilities, which are in the main the delivery of integrated, comprehensive and quality primary health care, we must reaffirm our faith in the rights of the people we are going to serve, in their dignity and worth and respect.

We must reaffirm the principle of the inadmissibility of discrimination and treat our patients equally.

Our institutions have their own dynamics ranging from inadequate personnel to issues of management.

It is our expectation that you will be able to improvise and be creative and skilfully deal with these complexities prevalent in our institutions.

In the light of the ever-changing needs of economic and social development and the centrality of education and training in pushing back the frontiers of poverty, we will continue to revise the education and organisation of our training institutions, update the teaching materials and improve the methods and quality of instruction.

We will do these in order to train and nurture a contingent of leading cadres who are competent, who persist in taking the programmes forward to better the lives of our people with a pioneering spirit.

We need a contingent of specialized, high quality public servants who are honest, industrious and eager to serve the people.

We see all those qualities in you, and we will do everything to ensure that you succeed.

We are aware of the many hurdles that you went through when you started with this programme. Some people looked down upon you because of your background.

Others went on to point out that by merely being poor does not necessarily qualify you as a good nurse but that nursing is a calling. Surprisingly many of those critics who are public servants should obviously not have been there. Those criticisms were only made to detract you from your path of serving our people and you should consider them as water under the bridge.

As government we have provided you with a foundation to launch yourselves into a brighter future. We have also provided you with a means to uplift your families without being permanently enslaved to them.

You should therefore make use of the noble opportunity created to improve your prospects, those of your family members and serve your communities with passion, commitment and distinction and contribute towards the total transformation of our country.

We wish you all the best in your work.

Thank you.

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