UN General Assembly
2007

agreements necessary to pull the poor out of the morass of poverty and underdevelopment. We in my own country are of the firm belief that we will achieve the MDGs. Having emerged from more than three centuries of colonialism and apartheid, we inherited two interlinked economies, which we characterize as the first and second economies. The two economies one developed and globally connected and the other localized and informal display many features of a global system of apartheid. As South Africans, we have sought to strengthen the first economy and to use it as a base for the transfer of resources to strengthen and modernize the second economy, and thus embark on the process of changing the lives of those who subsist in the second economy. Indeed, without the requisite resource transfers, it will not be possible to achieve the MDGs, because our second economy cannot on its own generate the resources needed to bring a better life to millions of poor South Africans. I mention this because, as we all