As legislators we must obviously acknowledge the importance of attaining the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, and at the same time we must realise that our Constitution, in its Bill of Rights, goes much further than the MDGs in creating the kind of democracy that we strive for in South Africa. Poverty, for instance, is far more than merely the lack of income. It is also the lack of schools, the absence of health facilities and the unavailability of medicine.
In ensuring that the executive meets the MDGs, oversight should be based on actual outcomes and not simply on money spent. It is not good enough to be satisfied with the clean audit report and then not to know anything about the quality of service or the impact of resources on the lives of people, especially the poor. A performance audit is just as important as a financial audit. On oversight visits, legislators should especially engage with this kind of information, which is never reflected in the annual reports of departments.
Minister Baloyi reported that the country was on course to meet its obligation to meet the target in human development by 2015. In some instances we have even exceeded the targets.
In terms of MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education, we have met the target for enrolment ratios for primary education of 99,4%. We can just tick that box and say to ourselves "target reached, well done". This figure does not, however, measure the quality of education being received, the number of days that teachers are in the classrooms, or the number of dropout children in five years' time. This does not indicate why we, despite spending about 6% of the gross domestic product, GDP, on education, form part of the bottom quartile of performers on our continent. Being guided by the MDGs is clearly not enough. As parliamentarians we should perhaps be engaging differently with these issues while we insist on oversight, be it as a member of a portfolio committee or as a head of a constituency. We should be asking, as hon Trollip said, difficult but relevant questions.
We should gather anecdotal data to enable us to form an idea of how ordinary people at ground level experience service delivery. We should visit schools, clinics, hospitals and libraries. We should regularly speak to, for example, teachers, health workers and parents. In that way we can hear first-hand what their concerns and issues are and then hold officials accountable for instances of ineffective service delivery.
Oversight, then, is a tool to ensure that the services that are delivered make a difference in the lives of people. The objective of oversight anywhere in the world is to raise the level of accountability. Parliament has a mandate to hold the executive to account. We can expect from them and demand of them to attend meetings to convey certain information we need for exercising our oversight duty in a proper fashion.
We must hold officials to account and summon them to appear before the committee whenever we find it necessary. If a director-general, in the Free State would not allow a portfolio committee to perform oversight at a Thusong centre in Kroonstad, she should be summoned to appear before the portfolio committee because officials are by law accountable to Parliament. Officials must be expected to account, to answer difficult questions concerning service delivery.
Parliament and provincial legislatures indeed have a very constructive role to play in attaining the Millennium Development Goals. Members of Parliament and MPLs should ensure that the achievement of the MDGs is only the first step in creating the type of democracy all South African citizens are entitled to. [Applause.]