Chairman, this Bill, as we have heard, is a very small technical Bill, but if we didn't have it, our country would be in crisis. Indeed, we can be thankful for the technocrats in our Public Service who have the skills and knowledge to give effect to these important laws. Thank you, all of you, for your inputs into this Bill.
Mr Speaker, it was President Julius Nyerere who warmly looked forward to South Africas becoming a free and liberated nation, because he saw the technology and skills that South Africa already had as adding prestige to all of Africa.
This Bill reaffirms Mwalimu's wisdom because it demonstrates that there have been technologically high international standards in measurements for over 100 years. The first measuring law was drafted in 1902, the year in which the Anglo-Boer War ended and a laboratory was established soon after in Pretoria, where I as a very small boy stood fascinated to see what one pound looked like as the standard measure. Managing our trade and ensuring honesty in business needs a Bill like this.
You know, Mr Speaker, a document called "Ready to Govern" was produced by the ANC in the 1990s. I always thought that there was a note of apprehension and whistling in the dark in the very title of that document.
What we have learnt now in our portfolio committee, and our chairlady, to her credit, freely admitted it, is that this Bill is not some little technical matter, but a vital and important law for doing the work of running a modern urban and industrialised society, as we are in South Africa. It is having the legal and technical infrastructure in place, of which this Bill is part, that enables South Africa to take its place as part of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, group of nations.
On Thursday, Mr Chairman, I was at Saldanha and there we saw the Department of Trade and Industry not doing its proper, technical job. Its meeting, which was the very important delivery of a special economic zone to the licensee, was hijacked by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Marius Fransman. I saw him in action and I must say that after his anti-Semitic remarks and a few other things he said, all I could think of was "gauleiter". He was a scandal, and the Minister has had a letter from me setting out my views on that. The ANC could easily have had a rally before or after the meeting, at which the President and Mr Fransman could have spoken. I must continue with a comment on the President. At that meeting he gave the ANC a little lecture on what proper democracy means, and I think he deserves our recognition for doing that.
There's a quotation from the Good Book, which means people will know it, ...