Fellow Rotarians and friends
Let me start with a tale that has been told many times over but is worth retelling.
Little over 100 years ago, Paul P. Harris, an attorney, got the idea of creating a professional group with the same friendly spirit he felt in the small towns of his youth.
On 23 February 1905, Harris called together a meeting of three acquaintances in downtown Chicago. Gustave E. Loehr was a mining engineer and freemason; Sylvester Schiele was a coal merchant, and Hiram E. Shorey was a tailor.
This was the first Rotary club meeting. They decided to call the new club “Rotary” after the practice of rotating meeting locations.
Today, Rotary has grown into 1,2 million members who come together to create positive, lasting change in our communities and around the world. We do not comprise the largest organisation by numbers but we are certainly the most influential.
Rotary was key to the founding of the United Nations. The first meeting of the UN took place in London on the 16th January 1946, hosted by District 13 at the Caxton Hall, presided over by RI President Tom Warren, who declared it to be the 'touchstone for a gesture of international goodwill unique in the history of Rotary'.
Rotary is the trusted partner on the ground for global players such as the Aga Khan University, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Global FoodBanking Network, UNESCO-IHE,
UNICEF, and the World Health Organisation.
In some ways, the world of the young Paul Harris and my own world were not very different.
Harris enrolled at the University of Vermont in Burlington but was expelled with three others in December 1886 because of his involvement in an underground society. I was expelled from the University of Durban-Westville because of my involvement in the student protests of 1980.
Had Harris not been expelled, he probably would not have ended up studying at Princeton University in 1887. Had I not been expelled, I too would not have ended up studying at Princeton 99 years after he did.
Paul Harris and his business colleagues lived in a world where time moved more slowly. One would dictate a business letter to a secretary, have it posted, and wait weeks for the correspondence to flow back and forth before the real work got done. This left lots of time for weekly lunch or dinner meetings – they were leisurely affairs no doubt.
Our world today is very different to that of Chicago 1905. We have instant communication with global partners 24 hours a day 7 days a week. In a world where one travels overnight halfway across the world, the idea of committing to a weekly meeting in a fixed location is just not feasible.
At the same time, the need for Rotary to continue to thrive as a global payer remains unchanged.
We play a vital role with our health programmes, spearheaded by our quest to eradicate polio in the near term as well as tackling malaria and HIV throughout the continent.
We bring life-saving water and sanitation projects to people forgotten by their governments.
Our educational programmes from scholarships through to our Peace Fellowships influence the course of global events.
Or it can be as simple as providing a blanket to a homeless person in the dead of winter.
Our Club, the Rotary E-Club of Southern Africa D9400, provides a way for those of us who are not able to commit to a regular meeting in a fixed location, to be able to play our part in these goals.
As members of the E-Club, we fulfil our obligation to meet on a regular basis by taking part in online discussions on our website – spend a half hour there once a week and we are compliant, as my friend Valentin Mičić is fond of saying.
But the real work is in our projects. As president-elect Annemarie Mostert has shown us through the photographs lining these walls, for a fledgling club barely 6 months old, we have not done too badly at all.
I stand before you today as charter president of this new and exciting club. Frankly, the selection process went something like this: someone asked, "Who should be president?" and everyone except me took a step back. Like me, my fellow board members have served as president in their former clubs in the past, and no doubt share my view that the best job in Rotary is "past president".
The people most responsible for getting us to this point are IPDG Anneas Balt and President-elect Annemarie Mostert.
When organisations get to be as large and as established as Rotary, there is a tendency for older members to frown upon new approaches. Anneas had the vision and Annemarie had the drive and determination to see out the process.
Our fellow board members Mark Doyle, Liana van der Walt, Rudie Viljoen, and Trevor Watson-Thomas have all risen to the challenge of holding board meetings by conference call.
We have yet to finalise our flagship projects for the year ahead with my fellow board members.
Personally, I'm a fan of bricks and mortar projects where one builds a library or a sports court or a clinic and hands it over.
We are all aware that in this country, land ownership is one of the most emotive issues.
A project that has caught my attention is one spearheaded by the Free Market Foundation, which involves funding the transfer of state land to people who have lived there for generations. The model has been successfully tested in Parys in the Free State. Little over 1200 rand is what it takes to turn a family into property owners. I will be engaging with the Free Market Foundation to see whether there is room to work together, given that the FMF is not in the business of raising funds.
Also on the question of land, there is now a strong case being made for ownership of so called tradition lands in the former Bantustans to be turned over to those living there. Some of this land in the former Transkei and KwaZulu is extremely fertile and can generate wealth, but one needs ownership of land before one can invest in its development. I believe there can be a role for us to play before and after through fundraising for the process, irrigation projects, and education on modern profitable farming techniques. Such actions can provide a more sane business model to land distribution than that which led to dead pigs at a politician's farm.
But these are all ideas at this point. I invite our fellow Rotarians to put forward projects for consideration by the board. Be aware though – if you put forward a project, you will be expected to champion the project and see it through to completion.
Thank you for the honour of allowing me to serve as President. I look forward to an exciting year.
