I want to greet our gracious hosts at UWC led by Prof. Brian O'Connell; I want to mention my colleagues in Cabinet who are here.
We have with us, as you have just heard minister Uys who leads the Cabinet Committee and minister Koleka Mqulwana in whose ministry and department the strategy is driven from and minister Richard Dyantyi, Minister of Local Government and Housing, who probably has the most difficult task in our province, given the various problems that we face.

You've listened to Vincent Domingo, we've got the Director General and many of the heads of departments with us and Dr Gilbert Lawrence who leads them on a day-by-day basis.

Then I want to thank all of you, especially those who have come from partner organizations or potential partner organizations, as well as the learners and the young people who have come to join us here today.

I was at the rugby on Saturday and while we were still hoping that Western Province would win, someone by the name of Mr Levi came up to me and said that his wife would be coming to UWC on Monday, and that he will check if she understands more about social capital after the talk.

You know that we are in a province where 80% of those who are unemployed are young people. Where every month three thousand youth are arrested for crime related activities. That we have more young people reaching matric but that 50 % of them have no hope of getting into a higher educational institution or even into a job.
They in turn encourage those who are still in the queue studying towards grade twelve to prevent them from dropping out because the message they send is "it doesn't matter".

We are in a province where 43 children out of every one thousand suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. In Michells Plain, Manenberg, Gugulettu, Khayelitsha and Nyanga in those few areas alone 47 gangs fight for supremacy. Forty four out of one thousand live births in Khayelitsha represent the worse infant mortality rate in the whole of the Western Cape, while our average is around thirty-one. Of everyone in the age group 25 - 29 years 12,4% live with HIV/AIDS. In the year 2002 alone 300 boys or young men between the ages of 15 and 24 years died violent deaths.

So the challenge that we face is not only a challenge about prosperity, it is not only a challenge about growth rates. The record shows that Japan over the last few decades has been able to triple their growth rate, but they have also been able to triple their suicide rate. So growth and well-being do not necessarily go together.

America has over the last two decades doubled their household incomes and improved their life styles, but they remain a fundamentally dysfunctional society. So the answer is largely in the economy, but not solely in the economy.

I am very happy that Minister Uys has given you the background to iKapa Elihlumayo and that the Western Cape Government has decided that we need a strategy that will grow the Cape, that will share the Cape and that will make the Cape a home for all. And that is why social capital is the first of our strategies that we launch, because I believe it is the foundation on which every other strategy must stand.

Mrs Levi, who is present, will be able to tell her husband tonight that simply put "social capital is the glue that holds society together". And that the key ingredients of that glue has to be, on the one hand mutual trust and on the other hand reciprocity, the ability to give to each other and to receive from each another.

It is on the basis of that trust and reciprocity that collective action is enabled because the enemy of collective action is mistrust and the enemy of collective action is when you don't see anything being mutually shared between people. And the collective action is not a mindless action. It is a collective action through institutions that must be built up and strengthened, networks that we must harness, relationships that we must build, and norms that must become the values on which we begin to base our action.

I want to make the point that social capital is not an automatic product of democracy, that when you have democracy you therefore have social capital. Democracy can sometimes give rise to many social capitals not pulling in the same direction. But social capital is the key that makes democracy work and if we understand democracy as the platform for social and economic well-being, then the simple point that I want to make is that both stakes as in governments and markets as in the economy, work better in civic settings where social capital is obtained, where we share norms, where we work together, where we pull together, where our networks interact and we are able to harness collective action towards common goals.

Robert D. Paternum, looking at a very fragmented a very unstable and sometimes a very vicious Italian society asked the question how in a society like this does personal trust and family trust exist in the full sense of the word whether it is the mafia family or the normal family. How does personal trust translate into social trust and how does it become a useable social capital, how can we harness all of that.

He goes on to say that we've got to use the networks of civic engagement when we come together like this, when our organizations that we come from and our networks that we come from begin to intersect with other networks and with government and with other layers of society that we've got to use the networks of civic engagement to
1. increase connection and
2. to penalize defection.
We've got to increase the connection between people. And so, there is nothing good in Christians and Muslims fighting a holy war against each other when they share a God. How do we increase a connection between them.

There is no good in government and civil society fighting fruitless battles for supremacy for the public mind, when we both have what the other wants and what we both need to click it together to make society work. We've got to increase that connection. When schools remain divided and they don't share resources, teachers and don't share syllabi. We've got to increase connection but at the same time we've got to penalize defection.

It is illegal to be a member of a gang, if you don't get that message out then you are not penalizing defection from the norms of society. Where people in a community deal with drugs you've got to penalize them because it is not good to deal with drugs and the same with shebeens that give wine and alcohol to children under the age of eighteen - you've got to penalize them. So on the one hand it is to increase connection and on the other hand to penalize defection from the norms of society.

The second point that he makes is that we must foster robust norms of reciprocity. We must make a deal with the youth. If they stay in school and make the hard choices to learn Maths, Science and Computer Technology, then there will be a tomorrow for them. There has got to be a reciprocity that if they make the hard choices and avoid the short cuts in school, then society opens its doors for the new economy, for them to participate in. But if they are going to choose the easy subjects, then they are going to become part of the fifty percent that don't go into higher education and don't go into a job.

Those are the kind of deals that robustly foster reciprocity. We've got to be able to say that if you are the kind of young person who stays away from drugs, then government will foster school sport, will build school facilities and will see if you can come into the Bafana squad for 2010. Every opportunity must open up for you. And those are the deals of reciprocity that we have to be making.

Thirdly we must facilitate trust in building an information government. We can't spin all the time. Government can't explain away the evils all the time without taking the responsibility. We've got to make sure that our information teaches people about how to use hospitals, how to access the welfare system, how to bring a small business proposal into fruition, etc. It has to be useful and meaningful information.

Fourthly we must provide continuities in collaboration. We can't do single year deals with our partners. We've got to get into programmatic deals with our partners that says, that if you successfully walk this path with us and you spend our money fruitfully and you don't want to spend it all on the Toyotas you want to buy and the latest electronic notebooks and salaries that surpass those of the president. If you spend our money wisely, then we will walk this path with you in partnership, because we want to provide continuities in collaboration. And those are some of the key things that begin to build the social capitals, that we speak about.

What all of this means is that we must make one decisive paradigm shift and that is the shift in relationship, from vertical relations between patrons and clients, to horizontal relations between partners and that effectively is a shift from exploitative relationships that come from vertical ones, to partnership that foster collaborative relationship and that come from horizontal ones. And in this way the State has to reformulate the relationship with its partners and shift it from the vertical to the horizontal.

I've just been reading some interesting things on the history of Indonesia after a visit there. They said that during the Suharto period where there was dictatorship and autocracy and it was a vertical relationship controlled by three evil sisters. I don't know why they call it sisters - I suppose it was because of the sound of their names, - they dominated the Indonesian society. The first one they called Opacia: there was a lack of transparency in business and political dealings. The second one was Rapacia: it was hyper-exploitative and corruption was rife. The third one was Absentia: a weakness and absence in civil society and in democratic institutions.

What government needs to be doing is to say that in the shift to horizontal relationships we've got to move away from those three evil sisters and make sure that there is not even a hint or a gap that either Opacia, Rapacia or Absentia, that is corruption or anything else can come into our society. That we must turn our back on corruption, because then the State begins to earn the trust of those that constitute citizenry.

That these condition for corruption thrive when there is a fragile sense of identity and national unity, when people are willfully divided and don't come together, when there is an over developed right to ethnicities, languages and cultures, when we all demand our own and no one says what is common, when we all begin to say that we stand for diversity and no one wants to stand for unity, or the opposite effect when we all stand for unity and melt away the diversity that exists. When there are great economic inequalities those conditions thrive, when there is a distorted sense of values or an absence of shared values then those three evil sisters take centre stage.

And so the question that we have got to ask is how do we build social capital out of these conditions that we have inherited. Ten years of democracy have not been enough to banish the three evil sisters, the lack of identity and all of those kinds of things.

The first thing that we have got to ask ourselves is what social capital are we competing against, what is the existing residual social capital that pervades the Western Cape and South Africa before we can put a new one in its place. The obvious one is apartheid. That it made Whites bond with each other, Coloureds bond with each other and Africans bond with each other. It made Afrikaans-speakers bond with each other, English-speakers bond with each other, Xhosa-speakers bond with each other and those who speak Kaaps bond with each other. It made the rural area bond amongst themselves in little towns and the city in townships.

That is the existing social capital base that we have, that we are working against, that is haunting us now as we try to build a new set of norms, a new set of connections and fashion new glue that can hold us together. But the Western Cape has to go even deeper. We have got to also in the Western Cape deal with the interruptions and destruction of social capital which come from identities that people had in the Western Cape and interruptions in transmission of values that was passed from one generation to the other. We constitute the Province, which has had the longest engagement with colonialism.

When Jan Van Riebeeck came here in 1652, colonialism started and the Western Cape's relationship with colonialism effectively took off in that year. The diamond mines and the gold mines were only opened when colonialism reached the north in the 18 hundreds. The wars of resistance in the Eastern Cape started particularly with the 1820 Settlers and slightly before that. But the Western Cape has had 400 and odd years of engagement with colonialism. What does that mean for the transmission of our values and the distortion of our values?

Secondly this was a province where the first peoples faced genocide both of physical bodies as well as of a language, both of them critical to the transmission of values, which are eternal, and values, which are absent today in the Western Cape. If we don't admit to that then we misread what it means to build social capital in the Western Cape.

The Khoi and the San have been decimated in the Western Cape, their values have been interrupted and the transmission of the social good and messages have been destroyed. There has been a re-peopling of the Cape in the form of slavery. Slaves were brought from the Indonesian archipelago, from the Indian sub-continent, from the east coast and west coast of Africa and fashioned together here with a common identity of being slaves. They had to form a new language, which resulted in Afrikaans as a language, which they are told they don't even own today.

And so the point is, what does this mean for a kind of social capital that we must build, if that is the social capital that we are competing against. If social capital is about trust, about reciprocity, about networks and about norms, how do we build that in the Western Cape given those conditions.

Given more recently the conditions where Africans have been made positively to feel unwelcome, where the Cape has been hostile to them, where they were not allowed to bring their wives and families to the Western Cape. What does this mean for family life, if they were not able to build homes except hostels for themselves, where they were not able to do work because of the Coloured Labour Preference Act, what does that mean for social capital and what does that mean for trust between Africans and Coloureds, between Coloureds and Whites, and Africans and Whites, what does that mean in the Western Cape where we want to build social capital?

Are we surprised therefore that given this particular long history of the Western Cape where we don't only have distorted values, distorted social capital, stratified social capital and interrupted transmission of values and messages and norms and standards from one generation to the other, are we surprised that alcohol and drugs become the scourge of our communities in the Western Cape, are we surprised when gangsterism becomes the social capital of note for young people in the Western Cape, are we surprised when violence against women is the order of the day on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape, are these not signs that when people enter into these horizontal relationships, whether marriages or family or friends or with neighbours, they force verticality, they force their will on those that they marry, they force their will over their children, they force their will over their friends in order to establish a vertical relationship when it should be horizontal?

And so what is the consequence of this long history of slavery, of defeat, of genocide, of marginalization and of violence. It can only be vertical subservience. Are we surprised when many of our fathers and mothers and our grandfathers and grandmothers speak about "more is die baas se dag", moenie die baas se tyd steel nie" - is that a work ethic or is that subservience? Furthermore "moenie hard praat met die wit man nie" - is that a work ethic, is that respect or is that subservience?

Have we internalized and passed it on from one generation to the other and how do we build social capital against such competing ghosts from the past. And so how do we build trust in the Western Cape given that kind of history, how do we make sure that we don't reproduce that disjuncture in our schools, in our churches, in our State and in the way we do our business? And so government may have to set the example. Singapore appears to have been able to overcome the Malay, Chinese and Indian divide because government said, let us set the example by being inclusive.

Secondly the government said let us set a further example by being humble, and so it was incumbent on every member of government to avoid ostentation and arrogance, to avoid aloofness and disrespect. So how do we do all of these things? Government as a initiator of social capital must not act as a know-all or know-best, but show humility through our ward committees, through our CDW's through our izImbizo, through our interaction with our social partners and to be able to listen and to process the information and to debate very hard if necessary, with those that we engage.

How do we use the NGO's the faith-based organizations, the community based organizations, civil society as a whole, labour and business, and re-invigorate all those kind of practices and organizations again? We do that by bringing them into partnerships with us and by mutually learning from each other.

And so our social capital will focus on youth because they are the best guarantee that the future can be different. We must focus on the youth because the youth are the most vulnerable in our society today, given what I have said to you earlier on. Our geographic focus must be on the presidential nodes, the one in Khayelitsha/Mitchells Plain and the other one in the Central Karoo, our 11 consolidate municipalities, the 170 informal settlements, the 10 drug areas where the worst drug abuse happens and the crime hot spots. And our budget focus must begin an investment shift by not avoiding the basics of government but by being able to drive the investment into those areas that build the social capital that we require.