Corporate Social Review Magazine 1st Quarter 2013 | Page 69

National
Lottery Board
Inaugural NGO
Awards Gala
Dinner
Opening remarks by Prof Nevhutanda:
Chairperson of the National Lottery Board
South Africa

“held the proper opinions for the time of year”
Indeed, the poem goes onto say of this Unknown Citizen:
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war,
he went.
The Unknown Citizen was, it seems, just a man. A simple man.
No different from any other.
At the end of the poem, after describing his Unknown Citizen
entirely in terms of the evidence of his life found in the official
record; his birth certificate, his employment record, his official
papers and documents, Auden asks the question:
Was he free? Was he happy?
And in reply the poem answers:
The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should
certainly have heard.
And in this way a human life is reduced to numbers and
assumptions and an ‘official record’ of an entirely Unknown man;
a life unremarked and uncelebrated.
But why, as we gather here during the 2nd NLB Stakeholder
Indaba, why as we gather here to celebrate success and remark
upon the most remarkable of our community, why am I quoting a
poem about this Unknown Citizen?
You see, WH Auden was a war poet, he had survived the horrors
of the First World War in Europe and now, coming to America, he
writes his poem as a challenge to our conventional view of what
is heroic, what it is we should celebrate.
The name of the poem The Unknown Citizen is a parody of the
Tomb of the Unknown soldier– that famous spot where fallen
soldiers are remembered, and the poem sets out to challenge
how we view the ‘ordinary’ people who are the untold story in
every single society.

Honored guests, stakeholders, friends, colleagues … we have
spent the day debating and discussing social innovation,
partnerships and sustainability, as well as Norms and Standards
for Funding and NGOs.
We have worked hard and we have achieved a lot. But tonight
we gather to celebrate and join hands in acknowledging and
rewarding members of one of our Stakeholder groups for
Excellence.
The NLB is proud and honored to host South Africa’s first NGO
Awards in South Africa – we’re taking this small but significant
step, in line with our moving forward strategy. We hope that, by
bringing partners and stakeholders on board, we will grow these
awards steadily over the next few years.
Before we honour our award winners this evening allow me to
leave you with these thoughts:
“He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be one against
whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree that, in the modern
sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For, in everything he did, he served the Greater Community.”
Those are the opening lines of a poem by W.H.Auden, written
in 1939, just after he moved to New York. The poem, called The
Unknown Citizen goes on to describe an entirely ‘ordinary’ man,
a man who:
“Worked in a factory and never got fired”. He also
“Had everything necessary to the Modern Man” and he
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