Social transformation is also a product of the resolve by members of society who decided that they no longer will leave the future of their children to chance; that no longer will they accept living in inhumane conditions; when people decide that the health care provided to the sick among them is everyone's collective problem; that the drugs and crime that rip families and communities apart are everyone's problems; when education authorities, teachers, learners and parents recognise that they are on the same side, and then they begin to share a common goal.
Social transformation is a product of being conscious about social injustices, taking decisions to act on those injustices, of planning the course of action and of executing those plans. We have acted according to this spirit from the very founding of the ANC in 1912 to the gathering of people from all walks of life in Kliptown in 1955, to the negotiations that gave birth to the democratic South Africa.
All of these events in our life as a nation were characterised by a deep sense of recognition that the situation we found ourselves in was untenable and we resolved to do something about it. We continued in the same vein after 1994, guided by Nelson Mandela's words that:
The purpose that will drive this government shall be the expansion of the frontiers of human fulfilment, the continuous extension of the frontiers of freedom.
It was this approach that guided the drafting and adoption of our Constitution, the revision and replacement of apartheid legislation and the formulation of policies. The establishment of the National Planning Commission was part of the process where, as a nation, we had to find a more effective approach to addressing our challenges.
Ten months ago, we presented to President Zuma, this House and the nation the National Development Plan. We presented a product of two years of research and analysis, purposeful dialogue and deliberation on the future of our country.
We presented a product in which the National Planning Commission took the opportunity to listen to thousands of South Africans from all walks of life share their thoughts, fears and visions about the future. We presented a plan which embodies the dreams of the people of this nation. As the poet William Butler Yeats, in his 1899 poem, Cloths of Heaven, writes:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light, and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
What has happened since we have spread this dream for South Africa at the feet of members of this House? In the weeks and months after tabling the plan in this House, various political parties, including of course the ANC, debated the plan extensively in their conferences and adopted it as a programme to guide our collective efforts as a nation for the next 17 years.
The NDP has galvanised society into seriously thinking about and debating the future of our country. In any given week there are conferences, seminars and workshops to discuss the NDP in various parts of our country. Not organised by the commission or the secretariat, they are organised by people across a wide range of sectors who care about the future of this country. Newspapers carry articles, analyses and opinion pieces about the NDP on a daily basis.
It's trite to say that not everybody agrees with all the details in the NDP, but there is no denying that it has become a central part of our national narrative. Political analysts, media commentators and, indeed, members of this House are increasingly evaluating government actions, policies and strategies on whether or not they are aligned to the NDP. So, clearly we have the country talking about the plan, but what about action?
Cabinet endorsed the plan during the extended Cabinet lekgotla in September last year. This paved the way for the focus to shift to implementation. Government departments immediately began to include some of the recommendations of the NDP in their annual plans for the current financial year, while the process of disaggregating the NDP into the first of the five-year plans in the form of the Medium-Term Strategic Framework also got under way.
Having listened to various members of the executive present their budgets over the past few weeks, members should have a clearer sense of how implementation will be structured over the coming years. Allow me to pay tribute to the many colleagues in the various spheres of government and many fellow citizens in all manner of organisations who have begun this process.
When the Minister of Finance tabled the 2013-14 Budget earlier this year, he took the NDP as the starting point. The Minister announced, among other things, reforms to strengthen the fight against corruption in the supply chain management system. He also assigned a deputy director-general in his department to this initiative.
This was followed by the announcement of a number of reforms championed by the Minister for the Public Service and Administration to address capacity weaknesses in the Public Service, as well as strengthen the fight against corruption. You heard that, hon Mazibuko. Just this week Minister Radebe ... [Interjections.]