Speech by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ms Sue van der Merwe, at the Graduation Ceremony of the Foreign Service Institute on Friday 14 July 2006

Programme Director
The Deputy Minister of Defence, Mr Mluleki George
Director General Ayanda Ntsaluba
The Head of the FSI, Ambassador January-Bardill
Senior Managers & Colleagues
Staff at the FSI
Graduands
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to have been asked to address you at this Graduation Ceremony of the Foreign Service Institute.

This ceremony is held in recognition of the graduands from our Diplomatic Training Programme. We also honour graduands from our South African National Defence Force (SANDF)/ARMSCOR Senior Management Foreign Policy and Protocol Training and the young men and women who have completed the DFA Learnership Programme.

Firstly, I must express our gratitude to our Director-General and also to Ambassador January-Bardill and her staff at the Foreign Service Institute for once again achieving outstanding results in the above courses. It is always exciting to share in the enthusiasm of the launch of new careers and callings, particularly in the field of international diplomacy.

In coming together to celebrate the achievements of all these graduands, we are also acknowledging the attainments of those who have excelled in their studies, those who did not miss any parts of their course; those who persisted and persevered and attained greater heights and who through their hard work have inspired others to do even better.

On this occasion I am reminded of a beautifully-written and insightful book called Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri. In this novel he describes what an ideal centre of learning should be like and he writes the following memorable lines:

"The universities were places for self-perfection, places for the highest education in life…. The sages listened more than they talked; and when they talked it was to ask questions that would engage endless generations in profound and perpetual discovery. The universities and the academies were also places where people sat and meditated and absorbed knowledge from the silence. Research was a permanent activity, and all were researchers and appliers of the fruits of research. The purpose was to discover the hidden unifying laws of all things, to deepen the spirit, to make more profound the sensitivities of the individual to the universe, and to become more creative."

For all those who have successfully completed their training, the challenge must surely be to continue to strive towards self-perfection, self mastery for the collective good, for the benefit of our country and our nation as a whole and to continue to ask questions and present answers that can take us towards a more humane, sustainable world.

The challenge is that - through your learning and in the world of work - you continue to feel a deepening of the spirit, a more thorough understanding of the needs of our people and what is to be done to create a better life.

In this regard, we should also recognize that our strengths as a country can help to serve as a catalyst for a more generalized continental growth. Our state owned enterprises and corporate sector have a demonstrable desire to be partners in the development process in support of NEPAD. NEPAD has indeed placed African priorities such as agriculture, infrastructure, ICT, research and development, health, institution and capacity building, firmly on the international agenda, thus changing the dominant development paradigm that has for so long been imposed on our continent.

Part of your responsibility is also to engage in economic diplomacy. In this regard, economics refers to a range of activities, not simply international trade - but includes external investments, financial flows, aid, bilateral and multilateral economic negotiations and technology exchanges, which together contributes to image-building and the construction of a valuable National Brand.

Economic diplomacy is now an active and interconnected factor in integrated diplomacy, where the lines of division between functional areas are blurred, and where each sector influences the other.

The challenge is that in your approach to the needs of this country and this continent, you become more creative and that you use this creativity to benefit humanity as a whole. Our learnerships and training programmes must be liberating and seek to humanise us, as much as our role is also to bring about a greater caring and giving in others. We need to carry out all our efforts with a real and profound consciousness of the need for and the gains of a more people-centred and inclusive world.

Richard Florida in his bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, argues that in today's world, we may indeed need new structures to harness creativity such that they become "ingrained features of our economic life."

"Human creativity" he tells us "is multifaceted and multidimensional."

"It is not limited to technological innovation or new business models. It is not something that can be kept in a box and trotted out when one arrives at the office. Creativity involves distinct kinds of thinking and habits that must be cultivated both in the individual and in the surrounding society. Thus, the creative ethos pervades everything from our workplace culture to our values and communities, reshaping the way we see ourselves as economic and social actors - our very identities."

The challenges that we face, as a nation, within an increasingly complex global community, demand a level of extra-ordinary commitment and excellence, which can only be achieved within a rigorous training environment with a focus on a high-level of sustainable skills development.

We have emerged out of a peculiarly painful past where apartheid kept people in different boxes, divided them and gave them separate lives and destinies that condemned the majority to lives of suffering and poverty while the few were pre-given privileged status and allowed to amass wealth.

The challenge in post-apartheid South Africa has been how to think outside of these boxes, beyond the mindsets of the past and to insert ourselves into a new world through our own collective efforts and through asserting our own unique identities through a display of the reality of this unity-in-diversity working together as one on a world stage.

Indeed, this has required of us that we do reshape the way we see ourselves and the way we develop our identities not simply as a political player, but also as an economic and social actor on the national stage and in the global arena.

I think that all of our graduands come out their training fully aware of their responsibilities as part of the frontline of the African renaissance and as among those who task it is to market their country and continent on the world stage. Part of this responsibility is to ensure that everything you do helps to take this country and Africa as a whole to higher levels of economic growth and to improve the quality of lives of all our people.

In this context, I am happy that the Department of Foreign Affairs has taken a conscious decision to reposition the Foreign Service Institute as a "Centre of Excellence". It is striving towards becoming a vehicle through which the Department can contribute towards the national priorities of South Africa, especially in terms of skills development identified in the Government's ASGISA and JIPSA programmes of action. Meeting the objectives outlined in these programmes can only be realised through an approach premised on integrated skills development, which promotes lifelong learning.

Our fundamental objectives, in the main, still remain:

To produce highly skilled and well-rounded South African foreign service officials, to impart indispensable knowledge and skills for the development of South African society as a whole and most importantly to develop the requisite capacity in the entire public service.

This is being done by ensuring that our training is in line with international benchmarking standards and comparable with similar training institutes world-wide. The training remains centered on a culture of human dignity and service delivery.

Through the learnership initiative in particular, I believe that the learners have been equipped with valuable work experience and skills that help to build their intellectual foundations and improve their practical know-how; and this should bode well for the future.

Our Department is pleased to have been in a position to offer permanent employment to 18 of the 39 learners and 5 contract appointments.

We thank the learners for their valuable contributions to the DFA and wish them well with their future endeavours. We also thank our coaches for their commitment and dedication to the development of our learners.

Part of our role as the Foreign Affairs Ministry and Department has also been to cater to the training needs of our brother and sister countries on this continent. The Foreign Service Institute has also been active in supporting the training of diplomats from Sao Tome & Principe, Sudan as well as from the DRC. We hope to expand this training to reach other countries on the continent, particularly those within our region. This is a commitment underpinning our African Agenda.

Your entry, as newly qualified diplomats into this ancient profession is marked by significant developments in Africa, in the multilateral arena and in the context of a rapidly globalising world.

It has been both our choice and our privilege to promote our African agenda also in the overall context of a Development Agenda of the South as a whole.

We remain proponents of multilateralism in principle and in practice. We firmly support the reform of the United Nations. We continue to lobby for the success of the development agenda in matters of international trade and investment as well as in the international financial architecture that would allow for a more inclusive development of the world's countries and people.

In this regard, the Millennium Development Goals remain a clear target and we belong to a cadre of diplomats that are working hard to meet the targets set for 2015.

Let me remind you of some of these goals that are critical for Africa and which all of you, in your various areas of international work, will help to reach. As countries of the world, we seek to:

• eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
• achieve universal primary education;
• promote gender equality and empower women;
• reduce child mortality;
• improve maternal health;
• combat HIV/AIDS malaria and other diseases;
• ensure environmental sustainability and
• develop a global partnership for development.

May I also remind you of the values of this Department: the values of patriotism, loyalty, dedication, Ubuntu, equity, integrity and Batho Pele that inform and guide South African diplomatic practice.

South African diplomacy seeks to help build a world of prosperous, peaceful, and democratic states. It will take hard work, but failure to do our work will have tragic consequences, especially for those who are poorest among us and for those in the poorest and most vulnerable regions of the world.

As a government, we will continue to promote the virtues of interdependence, co-operation and human values. We shall continue to fight for a world free of racism and inequality and to strive for all countries and nations to be regarded as equal players on the world stage. And we shall do all of these fully conscious of where we have come from and bring the uniqueness of our experience, our culture, our politics, to bear on the international stage.

As you return from your training to your various tasks, you will understanding that every day offers another learning opportunity, that the truly wise listen more than they talk, and when they talk, as Okri tells us, their task is to ask questions, to make discoveries, to theorise, to do research and to be implementers of plans that are workable and produce tangible results.

As President Thabo Mbeki said last week at the unveiling of the FIFA Soccer World Cup South Africa 2010 emblem in Berlin last week,

"Just as the sound is powerfully amplified in the spirals of the kudu horn, we see hope, connections and prosperity merging between the ancient roots and infinite possibilities of tomorrow."

As the President also remarked only yesterday, when he spoke at the launch of the African Leadership Initiative:

"We have a duty to build the Africa of the Entrepreneur, the Scientist, the Artist and the Visionary. We must bring back the Africa that lies within us; the Africa that taught the world civilisation; the Africa whose high priests of knowledge taught the Greeks mathematics, philosophy, medicine and the alphabet."

We are a nation of infinite possibilities and we do not expect any less of our graduands than we do of ourselves. We come from a people who dared to dream against all odds and to make their dreams come true.

Our task is never to give in or to fold our arms, but rather to make connections, to seek solutions, to plan, to prosper, to create anew.

Once more, let me take this opportunity to congratulate the graduands in our midst and to wish them well for the future.

I thank you.