State of the Nation Address

I was waiting to hear the State of the Nation Address by Thabo Mbeki today. Its funny how people spent pages speculating about what he was going to say.

Anyway, I thought it was a *great* speech, but then I am a bit of a Thabo Mbeki fan. There seem to have been mixed reactions to it, with some people saying it was great (Jacob Zuma, for example, seems to have approved) and some people not being pleased at all. Helen Zille, for example, wrote a scathing response to it. Which I think was a bit petty really. Maybe they thought they had more favour with him than they did, maybe they saw him as more removed from the ANC than he is. But he is there as representative of the ANC after all. And he is an ANC man, of course, and losing at Polokwane doesn't make that any less true.

But anyway, what do I know!

He ended with the optimistic:

Having said all that I have said, I come back to the question: what is the state of our nation as we enter 2008!

What I do know and hereby make bold to say is: whatever the challenges of the moment, we are still on course!

For the full text of the State of the Nation Address, go here.
And for a *wonderful* four sentence long summary of the 16 page long speech, go here.