Your Royal Highnesses, Fellow Nobel Peace Laureates, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen… One of the inescapable implications of globalisation is an enormous increase in the interaction between people from different backgrounds, cultures, languages and religions. The management of the resulting cultural, language and religious diversity will be one of this century’s greatest challenges.
Thanks Zohra Dawood and Centre for Unity in Diversity for invitation.
Thank you Mr Suhr, for your introduction and the perspective of KAS on our important conference. Former President De Klerk has set the scene further by his astute analysis and comments about the possible change of section 25 of the Constitution.
We have convened this Conference at a critical time in the history of our young democracy.
The ANC and Parliament have adopted resolutions calling for expropriation without compensation (EWC). By so doing they have posed a fundamental threat to investment, economic growth, agriculture, food security and to the national accord on which our new nonracial democracy was founded.
It is a great pleasure for me to be able to address this conference on the topic of transformation management.
You executives in the energy sector have to wrestle constantly with the challenges presented by the rapidly changing environment in which you operate.
The peaceful resolution of South Africa’s long-standing racial imbroglio 24 years ago seemed to show that even the most intractable disputes could be solved peacefully by compromise and negotiation. Our experience gave new hope to the world that it might be possible to mediate the impossible and that other long-standing disputes might also be resolved through peaceful negotiations.
Everywhere people are on the move.
One of the inescapable implications of globalisation is an enormous increase in the interaction between people from different backgrounds, cultures, languages and religions. The management of the resulting cultural, language and religious diversity will be one of this century’s greatest challenges.
Twenty-four years ago when we established our new non-racial democracy we hoped that South Africa would settle down to the humdrum process of becoming a normal society. We hoped that we would be less ‘interesting’ than we had been during the preceding 30 years.
We were wrong. South Africa was never destined to be a boring country.
Observers must watch the right markers in order to determine whether South Africa is now on a reformist trajectory. One set of markers relates to the rule of law, corruption and accountable government. These are getting the bulk of analyst attention. But the second set are even more important and relate to policy reform in areas of empowerment, the labour market, property rights, and education.
