Her Majesty the Queen Mother of the Royal Bafokeng, Mohumagadi Semane Molotlegi;

His Majesty, Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi III;

Members of the Bafokeng Royal Family;

Chairperson and Members of the North West House of Traditional Leaders;

Executive Mayor of Rustenburg, Cllr Wolmarans;

Members of the Business Community; Representatives of Organised Labour and Civil Society;

Distinguished Guests;

Bafokeng botlhe ke le dumedisa ka Pula!

Bafokeng should consider themselves an extremely fortunate people. Apart from coming from a history of a long line of many visionary and wise dikgosi and leaders, the community also settled on land endowed with rich agricultural and mineral resources.

They have a rich and proud heritage they have vowed to preserve and develop. And this Tenth Memorial Lecture in honour of Kgosi Molotlegi 1, attests to an indomitable will of Bafokeng to preserve their legacy for posterity.

The success of any nation depends on the ability of its leadership to strike a careful balance between the development of its material and human resources. Kgosi Lebone Molotlegi 1 was a freedom fighter, a pioneer and a selfless leader of his people.

His visionary leadership has carved a path for the Bafokeng to be what and where they are today. It feels us with a sense of pride to realise that his successors are continuing to burn and grow the torch of civilisation he created in his lifetime.

Bafokeng are privileged to lord over vast plains of platinum group mineral resources. The ability to sustain and multiply this material wealth rests squarely on the shoulders of the young members of this community.

Therefore, the need to invest handsomely into the future of the Bafokeng children can hardly be over-emphasised. It is very encouraging to learn that the Royal Bafokeng Kingdom has already developed a very ambitious blueprint for the socio-economic development of Phokeng and its environs.

The 30 Year physical infrastructure RBN Master Plan unveiled last year, and its incorporation into the envisaged Vision 2020 socio-economic development plan, establishes a powerful development platform for the Bafokeng people, and contributes meaningfully to the economies of South Africa and our neighbouring countries.

The quest for acquiring new knowledge, and putting that knowledge to use in developing new products and services, has always been the most successful recipe for sustainable development. In like vein, for the Bafokeng to derive long lasting benefits from the current platinum resources, they must also invest in the strategic development of their youth.

We all know that the current rich platinum deposits will one day be depleted, especially at the rate at which they are currently being mined. Now, this leads me to the next point of our discussion today, making wise investments by creating more value-added products through the development of our knowledge resources.

At the moment, most of the Bafokeng employed by the mining houses operating in this area are ordinary mine workers engaged in the digging and extraction of the platinum ore from the rocks.

This platinum is currently being sold at a very low price as raw material. However, if the same is beneficiated into new products and services it will acquire value more that a thousand times!

For example, one kilogram of steel is 90% material and 10% knowledge. But a copy of a Microsoft Windows Programme is 95% knowledge and 5% material. It should thus be clear from this example that platinum deposits can never be forever.

We need to focus our investments more into knowledge production so that we sustain the wealth of the whole nation. “Knowledge,” as a fine Cameroonian proverb aptly puts it, “is better than riches”.

The South Africa we inhabit today is defined by vast opportunities never before seen. Allow me to explore with you some of the opportunities offered by the world of science, engineering, technology and innovation.

The Ministry of Science and Technology provides leadership and policy direction to a National System of Innovation that firmly believes that business, government and civil society share a vision for a successful future, and need to share all the material and human resources that can turn that vision into reality.

Thus, more than ever before, we need to enhance the capacities of our youth to enable them to fully exploit the knowledge produced by research, and translate it into products and services to improve the wealth of our country and the quality of life of our people. In an endeavour to create an enabling environment for innovative young minds to contribute to the global competitiveness of our country, my department has put in place, among other things, the Innovation Fund.

The Innovation Fund is managed by one of our science councils, the National Research Foundation (NRF). The Fund provides funding to near-market and end-stage research, which produces new intellectual property, commercial enterprises and the expansion of existing industrial sectors.

Our higher education students, particularly the first degree engineering students, can take advantage of the Innovation Fund by developing, as part of their final year work, projects resulting in the creation of new intellectual property, establishment and/or expansion of commercial enterprises.

To this end, my department has established the following programmes, which form the bulk of our onslaught on the scarcity of skills in science and technology, as well as the general challenge of unemployment on all fronts: They include: The Internship Programme, run in partnership by my department and the NRF, manages a work experience programme for unemployed graduates, thus providing SET graduates with practical and accelerated learning experience towards building workplace competencies.

The Tshumisano Internship Programme, where we are working in partnership with Tshumisano, places interns within various technology stations such as Tshwane, Port Elizabeth, Vaal, Cape Peninsula, Mangosuthu and Free State Universities of Technology.

Among others, the interns are exposed to practical workplace experience in electronics, automotives, the manufacture of clothing, chemicals and material composites, agrifood processing, metal casting and metal value adding.

The National Information Society Learnership programme, which aims to contribute towards building an information society, and promote greater and efficient use of Information Technology. We will soon be launching, the Youth into Science Programme, whose primary objective is to contribute towards the development of the priority skills-base.

Through this programme we will be recruiting young people to pursue careers in areas of scarce skills. Our targets include doubling science and technology literacy among the youth, and nurturing more than 5000 young people with talent and potential in science, engineering and technology by 2010.

I am convinced that if the youth of this platinum-rich part of our country embrace and take full advantage of these and other related programmes, we would have seriously embarked on a path to renew and enrich our nation through Science, Engineering and Technology.

The time is now for our people, young ones in particular, to participate in the platinum industry not merely as miners, but also as critical players in the beneficiation processes of platinum.

I challenge the Bafokeng to lead the country in this process. We are encouraged to learn that the soon to be released Vision 2020 framework contains an ambitious education and human development component, which aims to develop strategies for supporting schools, educators, learners and families with their educational goals from birth to graduation.

This is indeed a visionary approach to community development, and we pledge our support in assisting the Bafokeng to realise its objectives. Let the Bafokeng follow in the footsteps of our forefathers, the Africans of antiquity who spearheaded civilisation as we know it.

They were great empire builders. They built strong economies and traded among themselves and with the continents of Europe and Asia. The Ethiopian Empire, which encompassed the present Ethiopia, the Sudan, Egypt and possibly some parts of Uganda and Libya, was by far the most impressive and majestic of them all. While the rest of humanity, including Europeans, were still savages living in caves, the Ethiopians practised agriculture and advanced irrigation using water from the Nile River.

They invented the calendar, which was already in use by at least 4236 B.C, and practised astronomy and astrology. They were the first people to write and practise metallurgy, mathematics and advanced architecture, which they employed to build magnificent temples and the awe-inspiring pyramids.

People came from many parts of the world to study at the academic centres of the Ethiopians. The Greeks and Romans, in particular, used the knowledge they gained to develop their own civilisations. Great scholars such as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Thales and many others were products of Ethiopian teaching and scholarship. So, use your resources to build good schools, equip them with laboratories; build science centres and other educational resource centres.

Give bursaries to your young to train as good teachers of languages, mathematics and science. Then they will be able to prepare your children, right from primary school, for the rigours of higher education. In that way, you will be guaranteed a cadre of knowledge workers among your youth.

I wish to propose a few ways in which we can partner with the Bafokeng to optimally exploit and revolutionise the vast platinum resources by participating in the envisaged Hydrogen Economy boom.

We understand that hydrogen, as an energy carrier, combined with fuel cell technologies to produce electricity, is attracting considerable interest from governments, international bodies and commercial companies world-wide. This new energy paradigm is dependent primarily on the availability of the platinum group metals, as catalysts, for producing electricity from hydrogen.

Many countries are relying on South Africa, as the main producer of these platinum group metals, to ramp up its production to meet the steep demand that will accompany the introduction of hydrogen as an energy carrier.

My department has developed a Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Research, Development Strategy. It is a strategy that boasts the full import of possible implications for South Africa for positioning the country to benefit optimally from the nascent global hydrogen industry.

There is a strategic place for the Bafokeng to participate in the implementation of such a strategy. At the risk of belabouring the point, allow me to highlight the fact that hydrogen and fuel cells are increasingly accepted as energy resources for the 21st century, which promise to provide clean and efficient electrical power from a range of primary energy sources.

The transition to hydrogen is expected to greatly reduce dependency on oil and gas, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, especially when used in efficient fuel cells. Presently, South Africa’s investment in Hydrogen and Fuel Cell R&D is low by international standards.

Our strategy will, therefore, guide South Africa’s investment in the H&FC technologies to allow her to export fully developed, high value platinum catalytic products to the global market, as opposed to the raw materials we are currently dealing with.

This address would not be complete without a few words about Kgosi Lebone Molotlegi 1, the founding father of the modern day Bafokeng wealth and prosperity. Not only did he wage a relentless struggle against the evils that the apartheid regime visited against him and his people, but he also understood the politics of power and economics.

It is for that reason that he waged battles against the incorporation of his people into the then Bophuthatswana, and later fought and won a protracted court case against the mining magnates, who finally acceded to the partnership that is now benefiting the Bafokeng.

Now, given the uniqueness of the Royal Bafokeng in our economic growth landscape, and the significant contribution of the platinum industry to our Hydrogen Economy, the last word of this 10th Annual Memorial Lecture of Kgosi Lebone Molotlegi belongs to Robert Solow: “Over the long term, places with strong, distinctive identities are more likely to prosper than places without them.

Every place must identify its strongest most distinctive features and develop them, or run the risk of being all things to all persons and nothing special to any... Livability is not a middle-class luxury; it is an economic imperative."

The Royal Bafokeng stand poised to develop their distinct platinum identity, their history of resilience and the abundant youth vigour to lead the whole of South Africa in the path of economic growth and prosperity. We must never falter in this endeavour.

I thank you.