Cobus Coetzee
Political Writer
FREE medical care, a school feeding scheme, electricity and public works programmes to train and employ the youth.
These were the priorities Nelson Mandela set out in his State of the Nation address at the opening of the country’s first democratically elected Parliament 20 years ago.
Mandela laid out his government’s plans on May 25, 1994 in Cape Town – less than a month after the ANC won the elections.
The Cape Times dedicated its front page and two other pages to Mandela’s address but there was space too for the pomp and ceremony surrounding the opening of a free country’s Parliament.
On the front page was a picture of ANC MP Membathisi Mdladlana, now ambassador to Canada, with his wife, Gladys, in “designer African dress” as the newspaper called it then.
Mandela gave his government just over three months to implement his objectives.
“There are major areas of desperate need in our society. As a signal of its seriousness to address these, the government will, within the next 100 days, implement various projects under the direct supervision of the president. Let me briefly mention these,” he said.
These priorities were:
l Children under the age of six and pregnant mothers would receive free medical care in every state hospital and clinic where the need existed.
l A nutritional feeding scheme in every primary school.
l Electrification of 350 000 homes in the next year.
l And a public works programme designed to rebuild townships, restore services in rural and urban areas and to train and provide work opportunities for unemployed youth.
It was part of the Mandela administration’s reconstruction and development plan (RDP) to which the government allocated R2.5 billion during its first year of office.
The newspaper reported Mandela’s statements were met with “repeated cheers” from the 400 MPs and 90 senators crammed into the National Assembly.
The minister responsible for implementing the RDP was then Minister Without Portfolio Jay Naidoo.
Naidoo is the current chairman of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. He was founding general secretary of Cosatu.
The ANC’s reintroduction of the school feeding scheme came after the National Party (NP) scrapped it 46 years earlier when it came into power in 1948.
Today the government spends more than R6bn on the school feeding scheme and provides meals to more than 8 million pupils in primary and high schools.
The Cape Times also reported Mandela ordered the release of about 1 500 children younger than 18 in detention and 14 000 youths in jail.
“The basic principle from which we will proceed from now onwards is that we must rescue the children of the nation and ensure that the system of criminal justice must be the very last resort in the case of juvenile offenders,” he said.
On the same day then ANC secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa was appointed to the key post of constituent assembly chairman.
The Cape Times reported at the time it “was interpreted as an extra string in his bow in the race to ultimately become president”.
Ramaphosa was elected as ANC deputy president in Mangaung in 2012.