Distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen. I am happy to welcome all of you to this important first summit meeting of Nedlac since its establishment last year and to declare the meeting open. The holding of the summit gives all of us the possibility to assess our work since wewere founded, to determine the extent to which we have discharged our mandate, and to indicate where we go from here.

I trust that we will do all of this in an open and honest manner aimed at enabling usto strengthen the capacity of this critically important institution to help our country tomove with greater speed towards the accomplishment of our agreed goals of growth, equityand participation.

We are all conscious of the reality that in the more recent past some exchanges amongthe various partners in Nedlac have raised questions about the very possibility ofachieving the kind of effective and meaningful partnership and consensus in policyformation we all intended with the establishment of this body.

It has seemed at times that perhaps the adversarial element in the relationship betweenand among ourselves was inherently so strong that, on important questions, it would ofnecessity and always overshadow and overwhelm the factors that make for cooperation.

With your permission, I would like to make a few observations in this regard.

The first of these is that, however divergent our interests might seem, we arecondemned to live together and interact with one another, both the unwashed and theperfumed. Divorce is not possible.

Inevitably the actions of the one impact on the other, for better or for worse, withnone in reality being capable of successfully pursuing their purposes without thecooperation of the other.

Being intelligent beings, we took the correct decision that we should find ways andmeans by which to govern this inevitable relationship for the good of all those who fallwithin the ambit of that relationship.

Among others and important among them, Nedlac is one of these ways and means and must,therefore, in all our interests, actually work, with each one of its parts able tostruggle for its interests while understanding that no partisan interest can be treated assupreme.

The second point I would like to make is that we have inherited a deeply dividedsociety burdened by a whole range of serious problems which will take some time toovercome.

At the centre of these are the continuing and frightful racial and gender disparitiesin the distribution in wealth, income and opportunity, the extent and depth of poverty,and the challenge to build an economy, situated within the global economy, capable ofgiving us the means to address these problems.

Given these realities and the important factor of where we come from as a country, ithad seemed right that, to the extent that we can, we should seek to cooperate amongourselves to tackle these challenges rather than pursue a war of attrition against oneanother, which would feed and entrench the conflicts of the past, resulting ininstability, stagnation and decline.

The transformation of our society will be a complex and protracted process, duringwhich we cannot eliminate conflict. That transformation must take place but we must alsobe on guard and seek to ensure that, through our cooperation, it is not drowned by theconflicts it will generate.

Among other things, such cooperation would enable us to identify the problems together,to understand the nature of those problems in the same way and, at least, to engage in ajoint effort to define the optimal solutions to these problems.

I believe that we are all of the same mind that each one of us as partners in Nedlachave an interest in arriving at such a situation, in our self-interest, first andforemost.

The third point I would like to make, which is of particular relevance to the processof governance, is that, clearly, human society in general is evolving towards the practiceof greater inclusiveness in that process of governance.

This represents movement away from the notion that the governors are a specialisedbreed of people whose unique qualifications enable them to have access to the code thatopens the door to heaven to enable the governed to enter.

Increases in levels of education, greater access to information and analysis, and theimpact of new information and communication technology all work together to demystify theprocess of governance and empower society as a whole to participate in the process ofdetermining its future.

By a twist of fate it may very well be that, as South Africans, we have the possibilityto be among the leaders in the world with regard to a purposeful approach towards theseissues that impact on governance and thus arrive at a situation in which we are not merelytaken along by a historical tide but become makers of history.

I believe that Nedlac, among others, provides us with such an opportunity.

The processes I have been describing necessarily imply that, in pursuit of theirinterests, each player in society must surely have the possibility to state their views,to promote and to canvass such views.

In this regard, I am of the view that part of what has been happening in the recentpast is that all of us have been tabling our views especially about the economy and socio-economic matters, pending the discussion which must take place among ourselves about theseissues.

It is both natural and necessary that with regard to these, we must move beyond thegeneral to the particular.

Earlier all of us needed to make speeches and circulate documents committing ourselvesto the common goals of economic growth, participation in economic decision- making, andsocial equity.

This was a necessary part of the process of taking our country forward from adisastrous past to a brighter future, and not a meaningless exercise in building a fakeconsensus as the cynics would have us believe.

But, obviously, the situation demands that we now engage one another about the specificsteps we need to take to ensure the realisation of the broad goals we have set together.

In this regard, I believe that it is incorrect for any one of us to treat the tablingof a point of view for discussion as an act of hostility or a declaration of war, howevermuch one may find that point of view offensive.

Surely, this process of identifying agenda items cannot be approached as though itmarks the end of the debate but the precise opposite, namely, that it signifies thebeginning of our detailed discussion, without which meaningful and substantive discussionwould be impossible.

I would like to believe that the wider the seeming differences among ourselves the moreurgent the need becomes for us to engage one another in discussion. We should not treatthose differences as though they were a summons to take to the barricades or act in amanner which indeed transforms them into a call to war.

The government occupies a special place among the Nedlac partners. In principle it ismandated by the people as a whole and has an obligation to take into account all sectoralinterests to an extent greater than can and should be expected of other institutions thatdraw their mandate from and are accountable to a narrower social base.

The government, therefore, cannot abdicate its responsibilities to lead and to govern,while still striving to arrive at consensus with its social partners, in its own interest.

An understandable complaint has been made that government has lagged behind with regardto the elaboration of a comprehensive economic policy, which would go beyond merelystating global objectives and heartfelt wishes and desires and arrive at practical,realistic and implementable programmes.

Clearly, the government must and is addressing this issue with all due urgency. Havingdone what it has to do in terms of policy formation, it must then come back to this forumto ensure the necessary interaction with its social partners.

We believe that the goals we set a few months ago which included a six-per-cent growthrate by the end of the century, the creation of half-a-million new jobs by then, and ameasurable reduction of poverty are all attainable but require a detailed elaboration ofthe means by which success can be achieved.

We trust that the combination of measures that government will bring to Nedlac as soonas possible, ranging from a macroeconomic framework to sectoral proposals, will both bescientifically based and, therefore, realisable, as well as consistent with our commongoals of growth, participation and equity.

The government must, by this means, play its role in answering the many policyquestions that our situation demands.

This clearly does not remove the right and responsibility from the other Nedlacpartners themselves to elaborate their own positions on the policy matters so that theycan make a representative and educated intervention in the decision-making process thatwill take place.

Our distinguished Executive Director, Mr Jayendra Naidoo, whom we must salute for hisdedication and hard work, has prepared an excellent report on the first year of Nedlacwhich he will present shortly. There is no need for us to duplicate what he will do.

But perhaps we need to make the point that, indeed, some of the kind of interaction weexpected of Nedlac has been taking place, for which all the members of Nedlac deservecommendation.

The general public may see all of this only through a looking-glass darkly, but thisdoes not subtract from the fact that we have made a start and laid a firm base for us tocriticise our mistakes and shortcomings, which will enable us to improve our performance.

Whatever the seeming problems of the day, including the delay in the implementation ofpolicies as a result of the need to engage many forces in meaningful discussion, there isno reason to despair.

I declare the summit meeting open, confident that we will have successful deliberations.