Honourable colleagues we are faced with the challenge of ensuring that the Bill of Rights and the laws we have passed are accessible and become meaningful instruments in ensuring that the rights of women are realised and respected. We must ensure that these laws concretely benefit women and children in the attainment of complete freedom and full participation in shaping the destiny of our country. We must constantly strive to redefine social relations, cultural values and religious conceptions as these affect gender issues. These are the challenges that face this legislature, the executive and civil society in its broadest sense. If we agree, Mr. Speaker, that discrimination, abuse and violence against women is a function of a material weakness based on the lack of access of women to the means of production, then part of our drive towards accelerated change and a nation at work will include a focussed, systematic and targeted strategy aimed at reversing the negative experiences of women.
Economic empowerment means, in part, also the economic empowerment of women.
This house must charge its members, including the executive to design mechanisms and definitive strategies to coordinate, monitor and evaluate programs aimed at the all-round empowerment of women. By valuing the lives of our fellow citizens and our children we are establishing a human rights culture in which human life will be cherished and human dignity restored. We have just emerged from a three hundred-year history of human degradation. We must ensure that the women and children of our country also enjoy the benefits of freedom and democracy. Allow me, Mr. Speaker, to conclude by paraphrasing a famous statement of the late Martin Luther King Jr.