And you will incur all sorts of collateral costs on the way. Literacy means employment so that it broadens the tax base and allows the Finance Minister to lower taxes so that the miracles of your entrepreneurial energies can soldier forth a bit less cramped than before. If the productive time lost across the length and breadth of the economy were calculated, the cost to the economy would run into billions of Rands. And economic growth is the foundation of our future. When is say this, that economic growth is the foundation of our future, some of you will think that tiredness has set in, near the end of my speech.
Economic growth is the foundation of our future.
But pause to think about that about our human ability to conceive of and plan for a future. Just as there can be no past and no memory without the grammatical past tense, there can be no future nor any forward looking projects such as a National Literacy Initiative without our ability to subdue time itself within the irresistible harness of our future tense, of our language. And language can bring us together, in the future, as assuredly as it was used to divide us in the past. So the eradication of illiteracy is also a project integral to nation-building, to the abolition of the two nations, black and white, poor and rich, of which President Mbeki has spoken. Alongside the equal respect now accorded our eleven official languages, the removal of illiteracy is a basic pillar of national reunion.