SPEECH OF THE COMMUNITY CONSTITUENCY AT NEDLAC ON THE OCCASION OF THE INFORMATION COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES SECTOR SUMMIT

Introduction

The October '98 Presidential Jobs Summit was in deed a watershed. Various constituencies met in this summit to thresh-out amongst other things halting of job losses, creation of new quality jobs and to a certain degree the identification of potential areas for economic growth and development. The summit was never limited to the above mentioned areas, it also critically resolved on some major social aspects. It was at this summit wherein a very clear mandate was derived to undertake sector specific summits to critically look at sector specific areas of economic needs, growth and development to enhance halting of job losses, job creation and economic growth and development with an underpinning aspect of service delivery to the poor.

So grateful, as the Community Constituency we wish to extend our word of gratitude to Ministry and the Department of Communications for adhering to the October '98 Presidential Jobs Summit resolution to convene such a summit through NEDLAC. Through this move, you have united constituencies to broadly agree that such a summit should take place and address itself largely to broadcasting, telecommunications, postal services and IT sub-sectors. These constituencies agreed that this sector of our economy is losing jobs at much more high rate than expected and yet it has a potential to retain jobs, create quality jobs and enhance decent work. Further to this, we have agreed that the sector is a catalyst for socio-economic development and that therefore communication is a basic right and all people should have access to affordable and quality communications services.

Over the last two months we were graced with so rear leadership characters and like-minded people who were able to conceptualise and contextualize the summit within the Reconstruction and Development Programme as was engineered and adopted by our democratic government. And as such, we have managed to place issues of sustainable job creation; poverty eradication; restructuring of the sector; integration into the world economy; regional development; development of human resources and; democratization of the South African economy into our agenda.

Therefore, NEDLAC as the social dialogue institution naturally becomes the correct place to address the above socio-economic challenges as faced by our society. Any attempt to disposes NEDLAC its rightful role will seek to undermine the nature of the institution and thus reducing key component of the society into a spectatorship role and allowing the few to dictate terms and the direction for the country's socio-economic challenges. The challenge is to broaden participation in decision making processes and to this far South Africa has the best model in the world to find the best expression of participatory democracy through institutions such as NEDLAC. Minister, your ministry and the department we commend you in this sober step to give NEDLAC its real meaning, an institution of social dialogue in South Africa.

Challenges facing the sector

As illustrated from above challenges of the sector are not mutually exclusive from those of the RDP. Most certain, the summit is about job retention and creation of new quality jobs as the means to enhance quality service delivery to the poor. This will warrant universal service to the country's under-serviced areas to ensure access to information communications technologies by the poor. Eventually, socio-economic development in a planned and structured way need to be put in place. Thus we shall integrate our economic activities, enhance labour markets and promote social cohesion, a goal that we still yet to achieve.

Integration of the women, people with disabilities and the youth into the main stream of this sector of our economy remains an albatross. Financial support and financial accessibility for small business development and cooperatives, and promotion of Black Economic Empowerment is virtually inexistence. Targets on equity are non-existing or if existing are yet to be met, so the democratisation of this sector of our economy will seem to be far-fetched without these targets.

Local content is very minimal and we need to promote and support the Proudly South Africa campaign, research and development and, create a reasonable bias to South African companies when procurements are made. Further more, support and promotion of South Africa languages, soft ware development, and community based broadcasting programmes, films, music and advertising is needed. Our local content can be achieved through the creation of more manufacturing industries and software development from South Africa. In order to achieve local content, we need more domestic and foreign investment with positive spin-offs on the creation of new quality jobs. These positive spin-offs on the creation of new quality jobs its off-spring should be a full scale roll-out of ICT infrastructure to historically under-serviced areas and schools. Promotion of rural development is not a new phenomenon to our developmental agenda at all and such should serve to ensure shared services and other services, access education and information for the rural poor, social interaction and economic integration.

Promotion of ICT education and subjects like mathematics and science from primary, secondary and tertiary level remains a challenge to South Africa. We need to support positive initiatives aimed at improving education including the idea of the ICT University.

We believe in greater powers to a regulatory body which will enable it to intervene where need arises particularly on enforcing license conditions and strict penalties need to be applied for failure to achieve license conditions and compliance with legislative framework.

Competitiveness is normally defined narrowly to suit the interest of a particular class in society as this has been used to define efficient and effectiveness inline with profiteering which supposing such as superceding service delivery and thus limiting social connotation behind this concept. Most fortunate, we identified that as party of the challenges, competitiveness should equally embrace affordability to services, access to services, equity, productivity and sustainable employability.

Like many sectors of our economy HIV/AIDS is the biggest challenge to the ICT sector but not only on how many victims would it wipe-out, however it should be on how best do we use the new technologies to find a cure for HIV/AIDS and many other dieses.

Special Agreements

1. Universal Service and Universal Access

Universal service is a public policy imperative and it must be achieved through measurable, realistic and achievable targets on short, medium and long term deliverables. Key components to this believe are a telephone line to every household or public institution, physical and other forms of addresses to individuals and public institutions and multimedia service to individuals and public institutions. In order to achieve these we need to be proactive enough in supporting positive initiatives and programmes aimed at addressing these. Undertake research and development on universal service and access.

2. Human Resource Development

We need a skills development plan and human resources development strategy which will be sector specific but conforming to national standards based on accredited learning and focus on previously disadvantage and vulnerable workers, the women, people with disabilities and the youth. The central thrust of this plan and strategy should be learnerships, apprenticeship, internships, ABET, transfer of ICT skills and recognition of prior learning.

3. Social Plan

As communities we should avoid at all cost not to fall into a booby-trap whereby we will be drawn into direct conflict with those who are currently within the labour market system by perceiving ourselves as the immediate idling substitute for the limited existing jobs. Joblessness is not as the result or the creation of those who are within the labour market system but is as the result of the structure of the economy and the interest of the captain of the industries and therefore job security for those who are within the labour market system is essential, as this will set the necessary trends for future not to allow workers to viewed as disposable material that can be easily casualised. However, reasonable discrimination should be put into proper context as this has equally largely affected those who are historically unemployed and underemployed. Its design was aimed at reversing the historical colonial-apartheid legacy of job preservation for the particular race group within our country and therefore it was suppose to be limited within that particular context until parity and redress has been achieved. Our failure to understand this may lead to a serious conflict within and amongst communities. We fully support the social plan as proposed on our broad framework agreement.

4. Restructuring at enterprise level

All plans for restructuring at enterprise level should be in line with the proposed social plan if it will eventually result on retrenchment of workers. This should be done in line with the proposed mechanisms to avoid uncoordinated and painful exit to those who may be affected by the restructuring of the enterprise.

5. Investments

Accordingly, we have agreed that appropriate package of the supply side measures available for investment should be made accessible. Investments should be on infrastructure development, software and hardware production and labour absorbing activities such as call centres and many others.

6. Procurement

Procurement should be done as the means to complement and complete value chains and value added, and develop new production capacity and skills. We have agreed on a database for procurement which can be made by either government, parastatals or large private companies and foreign procurements. A study to determine the maintenance of the database system, communications systems between producers and large consumers, developing new and appropriate technologies to serve the poor and remote rural areas and finding synergies amongst other investigations including fore-sight technology programme should be instituted.

7. Code of conduct and Research

We have agreed on the code of conduct as attached in our framework agreement. We have further agreed on submitting a proposal on research and fore sighting in the ICT sector to the Fund for Research into Industrial Development, Growth and Equity (FRIDGE) under the Trade and Industry Chamber of NEDLAC.

8. Post Summit processes

We have committed ourselves to detail this framework agreement on developing strategies to ensure the goals of the summit are met, ensure and enable the implementation of exist agreements, continuing to work to meet the goals of the summit, participate in policy formulation processes and monitor and evaluate implementation of existing agreements. These are but a some of agreements that we have reached over the last two focused months.

That's it folks!!