I think the motion of service excellence comes about as a tribute to people who are more often maligned, who are more often criticized, who are judged by the worst of examples rather than the finest of effective and hard-working people in the public sector. So tonight is an opportunity to say that the overwhelming majority of public servants are people who get on with their jobs, they come to work early, they leave late at night, they take their worries home with them, they think all the time about how they can do their jobs better and these people should not be judged simply by the worst examples where the system seems to fail people.
More importantly, they increasingly have to do their work with growing needs and with fewer and diminishing resources This literally means that they have to tap into their own internal resource of creativity, to see how they can do their jobs better under difficult circumstances. And it is a reward for those who do that, who tap into their own creativity to deliver services excellently to our people.
Our country has a multiplicity of challenges, but one of the defining challenges of our country is poverty. Apartheid has not only deprived our people of resources - of houses, of health facilities, of education, and so on - but apartheid has also broken our people. We don't only face the challenge of quality service delivery, but we also face the challenge that with every act of service delivery we also need to restore the dignity of our people because, had apartheid simply taken resources from some people and accumulated it amongst other people, maybe it would have been an easy task to just equalize these resources. That, by itself, is a difficult task.
What apartheid has also done, is that in the process of disadvantaging most and advantaging some, it has impaired the dignity of all our people, whether you were a beneficiary or whether you were a victim. This dehumanization of this oppressive system has also had a dehumanizing effect on the public sector. You can't administer a wrongful system without being dehumanized at the same time. And so when we come together to reward service excellence we also lay down a measure of how far we have moved to restore the human values in public servants themselves because you cannot give what you do not possess. You cannot be a dehumanized public servant having had to administer a dehumanizing system and then suddenly in democracy, be able to speak with the full confidence of humanity and dignity and begin to deliver services in a humane way.
You cannot come from a fragmented public service where in the House of Representatives you did one thing, and in the House of Delegates you did another thing, in this Bantustan you did this and in another Bantustan you did that and suddenly be standard bearers for unity and cohesiveness in society. Public servants themselves were the product of fragmentation - they administered a fragmented system, they were fragmented amongst themselves, they were made to feel inferior or superior to each other. And so when we come together to reward service excellence and to reward Batho Pele, we also do so as a measure of how far we have moved to building a representative, a united and a cohesive public service in the Western Cape and we can indeed say that we have made great strides, therefore forging unity amongst our public servants and spreading the message of unity amongst all our people.
So this fragmented public sector is one that I think in the Western Cape we can has begun to come together. We are beginning to build the basis for cohesion. The fact that we wonder and worry about how we will get different departments to work together is a delicious problem compared to what we were faced with when different administrations had to work together. And so tonight is a celebration of the fact that we are hard on ourselves about different departments working together and different pyramids within departments working together, compared to what we were facing a few years ago when we had to unite, for example, five different health systems, or four different education systems within one province.
The fact that education, for example, is able to show off like this today, says that it is possible for team building to happen within those departments because now we have a single department that everyone adheres to.
And tonight is also a signal that transformation is not a one-dimensional thing because, often when we speak about transformation, the first and dominant thing that comes to mind is color transformation. I think that is one of the most effective ways in which we have transformed the Western Cape government. This government looks significantly different today compared to what it looked like three or four years ago. We now don't have the heavy problem of under representivity of some groups at some levels in the public service. We now have the natural and delicious challenge of how to manage diversity within this government. It's not now any longer that we don't have a diversity problem because we all look the same or talk the same or because we come from the same backgrounds. We now have the delicious problem of having to manage the diversity amongst us, and that, I think, is a far better problem than under an under-representative provincial administration.
We did not make this administration representative through malice, through bloody-mindedness. I think what we have been able to do is to unite the best of those who were there with the best of those we brought in. We did not in any way compromise on issues of excellence, on issues of merit. We were able to show that by bringing in people of color we were not weakening the administration. In fact, we were strengthening it and I think the creativity that we've seen with these projects is precisely because people of different cultures, educational backgrounds and disciplines have come together to create the right atmosphere and to create a product that is more creative than what comes from mono-cultural organizations and institutions. That is part of why we are celebrating with these awards.
We said that our vision in the Western Cape is a 'Home for All'. This Home for All that we want to create is not a simple call to rainbowism of people of different backgrounds, colors and languages simply co-existing. What we are saying is that the essence of a Home for All is inclusiveness and participation, and when we are saying that all these projects that we reward are projects that have to make sure while we deliver services excellently and effectively, they must also bring people together so that they live out this idea of a Home for All. But a Home for All will only be spin, if it is not underpinned by the provincial strategy for growth and development, that which we call Ikapa Elihlumayo (the Cape that we grow and share) because the Western Cape is one of the most unequal societies in the country and we need to make haste, both in uniting people but also in making our society a lot more equal - that is the only way that we will make our province sustainable.
These projects have to be underpinned by both our vision of a Home for All and our Growth and Development Strategy, IKapa Elihlumayo. The 13 projects that we are honoring tonight are projects that enhance our understanding of Western Cape government as a developmental state, a state that intervenes in society, where its public servants are change-agents. We are therefore coming to reward people who have tapped into themselves and found creative means in order to deal with greater needs with fewer resources.
We are hoping that all departments of the Western Cape will be inspired by what they have seen tonight and by those 13 examples of what is possible if you really put your mind to doing things better and doing things differently. We don't want this to be something that people do for rewards annually, but as a part of our culture in the Western Cape Government.
