Hon House Chairperson, let us begin with the obvious. The question for debate before the Council is a wrong answer to the poorly crafted question. It takes away our focus from crocodiles, that is, unemployment, collapsing local government, poverty, inequality and now we must focus on lease ups. You give us such poor quality of questions of debate.
Firstly, you cannot transform an economy which you do not own. There is no control there. The reality is that, the post 1994 government is a group of people who do nothing but manages the common affairs of the white minority who are racists to our people; hate black people and hate black businessmen. How do you transform the economy which you do not own and control? It is not possible and has never been done anywhere in the history of economic transformation neither by the investment into infrastructure nor fast-tracking economic growth.
What is the economic landscape we seek to transform House Chair? What are we dealing with here? The dependable and trusted Statistics
SA told us that in the last quarter of 2019 more than 10,3 million people are unemployed and 9,3 million of them are black majority. These are young people who are professionals full of energy, willing and ready to work any day. Even those that have looked for a job and have given up on looking if there is an opportunity today, they will work but there are no opportunities.
There are 8,1 million young people between the ages of 15 and 34- year olds. These people are supposed to be transitioning from dependency stage to a stage of independence, productive members of society supposed to be adding value to the country's GDP but are not in education or in any training or employment. The economy is not growing at all under the ANC-led government instead it is going in the opposite direction. This has been the case for many years now. There are those who are in denial about this and we all know them.
According to the Statistics SA's figures released on Tuesday, we are on recession and not technical recession; just recession. This is the third recession since 1994 and we have had two of these recessions under the "New Dawn" of President Cyril Ramaphosa with the investment envoys, investment summits and investment pledges. Instead of economic growth, we are forever listening to slogans of Ntate Hugh Masekela time and time and again; may his soul rest in
peace, quoting from his songs. We are seeing absolutely nothing from your government.
More specific to infrastructure, 25 years into democracy we still have mud schools in Engcobo, Tsomo, Tsolo and many other areas in the Eastern Cape. We have our children dying because they fall into pit toilets in the Limpopo province. We have hospitals like Tsilidzini Hospital in Limpopo province with more than 60% of equipment not working.
House Chair, we have aging water infrastructure in Qwaqwa and many other areas in the Free State province collapsing due to poor maintenance. There is water but because of the poor infrastructure people cannot access water. We still have roads in Mtubatuba, Mkhanyakude District Municipality, Emnambithi-Ladysmith Local Municipality and places like Vryheid with roads that are killing our people on a daily because of a poor maintenance. We have government buildings, including here in Parliament just are filthy, dilapidated and not suitable for any human occupation, yet the ANC says there is a good story to tell.
We still have people who have waited for RDP houses for more than 15 years and some even die without living in decent homes. That is
under the ANC-led government. This is a situation of infrastructure in South Africa. You may not be aware or know about this because you take your car to the airport and fly to your suburbs and go to clean and well maintained public facilities. Your kids go to private schools and Ministers send their kids overseas these days for furthering their studies whilst poor black kids need to stay in these public schools.
The reality for many South Africans is that they do not have the best minimum infrastructure to live decent lives. What is to be done? First and foremost, we need to transform the economy through investment and infrastructure. You need land to do so. Government does not have land and that is the reality. Our people do not have land and it is only white minority with land. If you are going to build infrastructure on their land and not state-owned and controlled land on behalf of our people for common good, you will never transform this economy.
So, let us expropriate land without compensation. Once we have expropriated land without compensation we must agree that, first and foremost, the infrastructure that we need to build will improve the lives of ordinary people. We will build schools, roads and public transport. This important task cannot be left on the hands of the
white owned capital. If it is left to them, they will continue to build malls and they will just make them unnecessarily big even when the economy is doing badly. No one will go the malls to buy anything as they do not have the money because they are unemployed. They will build unnecessary big houses in Camps Bay whilst our people are staying in shacks because we were made to believe that shacks are for the black majority.
We must build state capacity to deliver social infrastructure and do away with tenders. We need to establish state construction companies, including provincial and municipal construction companies. These are companies that must build our schools, hospitals, roads and water and sanitation infrastructure. These construction companies must also build houses for our people because they will understand what type of houses our people need. We need to establish a state cement company.
We can transform the economy through investment into infrastructure but it has to be the state land. We need a committed government, ANC; committed president. Currently the ANC-led government led by President Ramaphosa is not committed at all to the plight of the black majority in South Africa. All these will immediately create some economic activities because local people will wake up and go to
the construction sites. At the construction sites someone must sell food; workers must wear work wear everyday and someone has to produce that.
There is a lot of material which involves investment in infrastructure that we are capable of producing locally and should start to work on it. These are the likes of tiles, paint, aluminium doors and all things that go with infrastructure. Chair, we cannot do anything if we have a Minister who is hell-bent on a misguided policy and Treasury that has failed to manage our public finances. Because their policies favour banks and financial sector, we are never told that they are failing. The Minister of Finance is cutting a budget for houses and infrastructure in local government. How will we transform our economy when the Minister is cutting the budget for infrastructure? This is extremely misguided.
The ruling party has no capacity and political will at all. Even sophistication to reimaging our society; transform the economy and build much needed infrastructure will have to be led from the opposition benches. We will give you advice because we specialise from such advices. Listen to the advices of the EFF and you will prosper in this coming remaining term of office. Indeed come next elections, we are taking over government because in 2021 communities
are going to entrust us with municipalities. It is then that the EFF will give our people services that they need. Thank you, hon Chairperson.