In the
Budget Speech earlier this year we acknowledged that there are a lot of problems in the entities of Energy. We acknowledged that and we told you what we are going to do. But let me remind you because we are now in Parliament. We said one of the problems in those entities is the collapse of governance. We said to you in the portfolio committee that when we correct and regularise governance we will be starting a process of dealing with both operational and financial risk. Now we are finished with the first group, the Central Energy Fund, Cef.
Once you have boards in place and governance is regularised, it is only then that you can start talking about rationalising because you must rationalise
something that is operational. We are in that process. On Friday as we were announcing the energy resource plan, ERP, we also announced the boards of various entities in the Cef group. On Monday we had a meeting with all those boards trying to show them that there is a crisis and there is no governance.
Let me give you this information for free. In all these boards not a single entity has a full time CEO. All are run by acting CEOs. My responsibility is to regularise that space and ensure that we appoint CEOs in all of them and then we begin to talk about strategies. They attempted to come and say I am having a strategy that was developed by half of the board. To me it is equal to covering up. We are going to develop strategies for each entity and then we can talk about rationalising them.
Question 172:
The DEPUTY MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE, LAND REFORM AND RURAL
DEVELOPMENT (Mr M SKWATSHA): Hon Chair, the total is R68 960,70 million [Interjections and Applause.]