STATEMENT BY THE RT HON. PRIME MINISTER
DR B.S.S.DLAMINI
AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE FIVE YEAR PERFORMANCE REPORT TO THE UNIVERSITIES, NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE AND ARCHIVES
AT THE CABINET OFFICES
TUESDAY 13 AUGUST 2013
Honourable Minister(s)
Vice-Chancellors of our Universities
Director of National Archives
Acting Director of Swaziland National Library Service
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Media
I am very pleased this morning to welcome, to our Offices, representatives of our Universities, National Library and Archive Services.
Every since mankind was able to communicate clearly to one another, information has been a crucially important component of human communication and progress in the development of societies. Get it right, and information contributes to productive and harmonious scientific, technological and sociological development. Get it wrong and it has the potential to do much harm.
The early days of written information saw many means of communication, from the symbols on the wooden tablet to the use of the papyrus reed. Then over numerous millennia we finally arrived at the printing press and the hard copy format of standardized letters and numbers that we have enjoyed for the past few centuries.
And then the information revolution took off. Today, information – or data as it is generally called – is transmitted via many forms, whether by radio or cellphone, whether by TV or the Internet. As global society has revelled in the huge variety of means of communication it is also having to handle new responsibilities for observing and protecting the necessary standards of propriety and integrity in the sharing of information.
This morning it is “hard copy time.” Last month, I presented, to the Nation, the Five Year Performance Report of the Administration. Today it is my very great pleasure to present copies of that Report to our Universities and to the information-gathering agencies of Government - the Swaziland National Library Service and the National Archives.
When this Report was presented to the Nation at the end of last month, I referred to the intention of Cabinet for the Report to not only represent our professional obligation to those whom we have served but also to be of technical and historic interest to the people of this country.
It is simply a Report on what the Administrative arm of Government has achieved over the past five years. It is not the achievements of Cabinet per se. Cabinet is for the Administration what a Board of Directors is for a company. It is the operating company that produces results under the overall monitoring and guidance by the Board. If those results are good, the Board shares the credit. If they are not, then the Board takes primary responsibility.
For the students in our universities and for the users of our libraries and Archives, we trust that a great deal of information will be found interesting and helpful in the Report, in addition to the achievements and the challenges faced by the Administration. It is an important piece of history, the details showing what were the institutional structures in place at the time, how we identified the priorities, how we organized the resources, and how we dealt with the difficulties. With the emphasis on addressing the stated priority objectives of the Administration, the Report was not necessarily to cover all peripheral issues.
Making the Report such a substantial document to the Nation was as a result of an awareness that readers would want not only a narrative account of the achievements and challenges, but also a detailed understanding of the scope of activities of individual Ministries, as well as what the public enterprises represent and what they have achieved.
The Report is also published on the Government Website but today it is my honour to pass, to our universities and information-gathering agencies, these hard copies that we trust will be interesting and informative to users in the months and years to come.
Thank you.