Pretoria - Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe says it would be useful for all South Africans to work even harder to cement the country's non-racial character in all aspects.
Responding to a Parliamentary question on whether the government remains on course in its endeavour to create a non-racial South Africa, Motlanthe said South Africa's challenge is not striving to be tolerant of its diversity, but exploring it and ultimately understanding and harnessing it.
The central vision, he said, should be one where South Africans believe in a common destiny.
This, Motlanthe said, will be the galvanising vision that will sustain our spirit in the course of fighting poverty and inequality, and that will keep us focused on building a non-racial future for all.
"It remains our collective responsibility to keep championing the vision of building a united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa," he told MPs.
The Deputy President said government would scale up its programmes of trying to fighting poverty.
While interventions such as social grants remained a critical element, government had to find more effective ways to bring marginalised communities into sustainable economic activities.
To this end, government, in consultation with social partners across the country, has developed a comprehensive Anti-Poverty Strategy (APS) designed to integrate and improve efforts to deal with poverty.
Motlanthe said the strategy, among others, would monitor and verify the impact of service delivery performed by departments on the progress and graduation of households and communities out of poverty.
Cabinet ushered in the War on Poverty Campaign in 2008 as a short-term intervention of the APS to address pressing issues of poverty.
Motlanthe said this campaign would also be scaled up to cover a total of 1 128 of the most deprived wards or a third of all the wards in the country by 2014, with an estimated 3 million households and an estimated 15 million people who live in extreme poverty.
