Chairperson, may I start by thanking the President for deploying the hon Nkwinti and me to work together. He has been a friend of mine for years
The President has, in fact, complicated my relationship with hon Nkwinti, because he has now formalised our relationship in government.
I am, delighted however, to be working with him in an environment in which one of the greatest challenges of our country is daily manifested through poverty, unemployment and huge inequality.
The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, says that in their culture, when they get lost, they are advised by their elders to retrace their steps. They go to the original starting point, and while going back they notice where they took a wrong turn.
It is in that spirit that I am now going to quote, so that we can reflect on what could have happened in the trajectory from then to now.
An anthropologist called Richard Lee stated:
Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality (about 5 000 years ago) people lived for millennia in small-scale kin- based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.
What we are asking is, what went wrong in the trajectory between then and now?