Thank you very much, House Chair. The Department of Trade and Industry has delivered on its target of being within 5% of its budget in spending in four of the past five years. Given that this is a department in which 65% of the budget depends on the take-up of incentives by players in the private sector - and not on projects that are run by the department itself - is, I think, actually quite remarkable.
The Manufacturing Competitiveness Enhancement Programme, MCEP, was launched in May to encourage manufacturers to invest in competitiveness-raising programmes. What happened was that the uptake in the initial few months of the launch was relatively modest, but it has picked up substantially since then. There are now 144 applications, which have been processed. There is a number of those which have already started to pay out, starting from October.
The Minister of Finance, when replying to the last debate, said that there were three ways that one could approach this. He recalled that one was the approach of integrity. You can declare the savings. We declared the savings, and those funds will be available to us in the whole of the Medium- Term Expenditure Framework period. So, as Minister Motshega has said, the funds have not been lost.
The other programme was the special economics zones process. Here, I think, we encountered what we did not anticipate to be a number of legal challenges arising from intergovernmental relations. But I can say that as we are still coming to Parliament with the Bill, we have simultaneously been doing work with the provinces to identify potential special economic zones that can be declared. Feasibility studies on 10 special economic zones, encompassing all nine provinces, are in fact under way.
So, I think, the process is not one where we have lost the funding. The process is one where there has been some delay, but we are on track to be within 2% of our budget in terms of expenditure this year. Thank you.
Vote No 37 - Transport - put.