Hon House Chairperson, hon Minister and hon Deputy Minister in her absence, we also wish to convey the Inkatha Freedom Party's condolences to her family. House Chairperson, we are South Africans, we are women so, we know the statistics on violence against women and children. We know because it is the highest in the world.
We know, because yesterday we were once more confronted with a heart- wrenching story. This time it was the story of 32-year old Joyce from the Jika Joe informal settlement in Pietermaritzburg. She had been searching for her 13 year old disabled daughter since Sunday, only to discover her naked body two days ago.
We know. But what we do not know is how to deal with this crisis because our government has still not come up with clear, concrete and costed plan to fight violence against women and children. We know the statistics on social grants, on joblessness and on poverty,
we know. The numbers sit in neat columns in printed reports much like the numbers in the budget before us.
Our job here today is not to just focus on the budget, but to fully appreciate the scale of the crisis we are facing. he problem is neither hypothetical nor far removed. Just outside the parliamentary precinct, there are destitute people who sleep every night on the freezing cobblestones and broken benches. Just outside the parliamentary precinct in the early hours of tomorrow morning, drug addicts will feed their habit while a young woman on her way to work might risk being mugged or even raped.
When will you put them first, hon Minister, as you said in your opening remarks? And I wonder where is our moral outrage at the plight of the most vulnerable in our society, and where are the interventions of the Department of Social Development?
Because quite honestly, hon Minister, we are tired of hearing of more workshops and summits, talks about talks, more plans when the desperation of our people is increasing. When there addicts in the streets and more children in children's homes. When there are more beggars at traffic lights, more people sleeping in our streets and more women facing war in our streets.
What we need now from you, Minister, is to lead a department that will drive radical consistent life-changing interventions under your leadership, and we need to see you, hon Minister, be the change that we need. Because for far too long, the Department of Social Development was led by a one- woman wrecking ball.
To make matters worse, the ANC's self-created SASSA crisis dominated our focus. The crisis was so intertwined with the ruling party that we were hardly surprised when now the former Minister of the Department Social Development told us that wives of ANC members, in fact, benefitted from the illegal Cash Paymaster contract it held with the state.
And even though SASSA is now on a stable footing hon Minister, the governance of SASSA must be strengthened. In the Fifth Parliament, the Inkatha Freedom Party, IFP, proposed a private members bill to establish a board for SASSA and we hope to bring this to the committee in due course.
I heard you on the matters of fraud pertaining to SASSA, hon Minister, but it is clear that you need to beef up the fraud unit, to make accessible to the public and to expedite investigations and refunds. Those caught stealing from the poor, must get lengthy jail
sentences. Furthermore, the grant system must be linked to training opportunities so that those who receive grants can also receive life skills.
But those will not be your only interventions that will have to make hon Minister, the plight of sex workers must be urgently addressed. Violence against women and children must be declared a national crisis and be dealt with as such.
The thousands of social workers who are sitting at home must be employed by the State, whether it is at schools to deal with violence or at police stations to handle rape cases. Greater support for Non Governmental Organisations, NGOs, is needed because they provide vital services on behalf of the state. We need more treatment centres for those who come forward to seek help for substance abuse and it is shameful that government is still not rolling out its free sanitary pad programme in all provinces.
Every community must receive funded shelters for abused women; this is a non-negotiable. Femicide in South Africa is five times higher than the global rate. Surely, if we can spend a few hundreds rands on prisoners in jails, we can spend more R5 on a woman in a shelter.
And no social worker at a shelter should still be earning less than the minimum wage.
Chairperson, as somebody who hopes to adopt children myself in future, I implore all of us to support and promote adoption in South Africa. To this end, the IFP will be supporting any plans that are afoot that will see adoption agencies possibly closing down. We look forward to working with you new Minister and chairperson of the committee. The time for talking is over, we must act now, and we need you to be as vociferous in speaking for the vulnerable, as you are when you heckle us in the National Assembly. I thank you.