Gloom and despondency have never defeated adversity. Trying times need courage and resilience. Our strength as a people is not tested during the best of times.

South Africa now needs skilled and educated people to say 'How do we manage and develop this democratic country?'

A number of African countries came to us and said, we request that South Africa should not field a candidate, because so many other African countries wanted to, and, in any case, South Africa would continue to play a role in terms of building the African Union, and so on. And they actually said, please don't field a candidate, and we didn't. As I have said, it is not because we didn't have people who are competent to serve in these positions.

As I said, the matter of the Pan African Parliament was raised with us by other African countries who said we should host.

I know there is a lot of concern I know about plans that Iran might have to develop nuclear weapons which arises from positions that Iran took in the past when in fact it did not disclose things to the IAEA… because they were hiding something. I can understand that.

Our experience over the last 20 years has shown that indeed people must themselves become their own liberators. You cannot wait for somebody else to come and rescue you.

We have been engaging the Government of Swaziland for some time on this issue of the democratization of Swaziland. In particular, I had asked the Deputy President to engage the Government on this and, indeed, he has. We will continue to do this, because we do think that, as has been communicated to the Government of Swaziland, that Swaziland must go through this democratization process, a constitution-making process in which they have been engaged for some time, and really seek a national consensus about it.