Deputy Speaker, when the "open toilet" scandal emerged last year, the former Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Mr Sicelo Shiceka, projected it as a Cape Town phenomenon. He even boasted that it would never happen under ANC governance.
The hon Members of Parliament on the other side of the House applauded him. Time proved that this was a typical case of the pot calling the kettle black. Since then, the issue of open toilets was exposed all over the country and, typically, the ANC attempted to distance itself from their public representatives in areas where these issues were exposed.
The Minister of Human Settlements has appointed a team to tour the country and pretends that this phenomenon still has to be discovered. This is indicative of the fact that the Minister's department is either ineffective or merely involved in a public relations exercise that has nothing to do with addressing the plight of the people affected by this scandal.
If the Minister was serious about addressing this issue, his department officials would have provided him with an audit of open toilets at least within a year after his appointment as Minister, and then he should have informed the people of South Africa of how he was going to address this - at least during the second Budget Vote presentations. His failure to do this simple task is an open invitation to the President to redeploy him as a backbencher. Cope urges the President to respond positively to this invitation. [Time expired.]