Opening remarks by Executive Deputy President ThaboMbeki
at the Nedlac Summit
24 May 1997
Executive Director, Jayendra Naidoo, distinguished participants,
ladies, gentlemen andcomrades
I am pleased to welcome you to this important second Summit of
Nedlac.
Last year, we took the opportunity of the opening of our first
summit to underscore thesingular importance of the Nedlac
initiative as a vehicle of governance and policy-making.
We stressed the need for us as social partners to define the
common goals we seek toattain and continuously to assess our
successes and failures in consensus-seeking andcooperative
agreement-making to ensure that Nedlac becomes the effective
instrument we allwant it to be.
In addressing these tasks, we are greatly assisted by the Nedlac
Act, adoptedunanimously in 1994, which, as you are well aware,
spelt out our broad objectives.
The circumstances in our country which compelled all of us to
recognise the criticalimportance of an institution such as Nedlac
as a vehicle for codetermination have notchanged.
We continue to be faced with the enormous challenge to find ways
and means by which, asa country, we can, together, tackle the
fundamental issues of the impoverishment ofmillions of our people,
the vast racial and gender disparities in the distribution
ofwealth, income, opportunity and quality of life, the rural-urban
divide, the building ofan economy that can meet the needs of all
our people on a sustained basis, and so on.
I believe that we are all agreed that these goals are common to
all of us and that theycan only be addressed successfully if the
constituencies represented in Nedlac pulltogether as we all
struggle thus to ensure the reconstruction and development of
ourcountry and society.
I am convinced that this important second Summit of Nedlac will
make a furthercontribution to the attainment of this objective, in
the interests both of our people as awhole and of each one of the
constituencies represented in Nedlac.
Accordingly, I would like to wish the Summit success in its work
and hereby declare themeeting open.
Thank you.