Chairperson, his friend says that the SA Police Service is demoralised. He is another stranger to the truth! He is living somewhere on the moon, not on this planet. If the SA Police Service ever enjoyed a moment of high morale, that time is now. We are with them day and night, in the rain, in the heat, and they are there. That is why the numbers of arrested criminals has risen to a point where that Minister has to contend with the problem of overcrowding in prisons. It is precisely because of the high morale among the members of the SA Police Service.
The NP and the DP want to demoralise them. They are shouting in this House and in the other one that there is demoralisation in the ranks of the SAPS. That is a blatant untruth. There is nothing of the kind. Their morale is high, and those parties are not going to succeed in demoralising the members of the SA Police Service. There they are in the gallery. [Laughter.] [Applause.] They are not going to demoralise them. They want to demoralise them, because they are waiting anxiously in the wings for a moment when we will not be able to overcome crime in this country. Every success that the police officers are achieving is driven right down to the bottom of their hearts like an iron nail, causing their ventricles to bleed profusely. Every time there is a major breakthrough, they become worried because they have nothing to say - they have no politics. There is no demoralisation in the SA Police Service. That is ... [Inaudible.] [Interjections.]
The issue of the underresourcing of the police started with them. The state of police stations in Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha and Motherwell in PE - that colonial setting - was created by this vociferous loud-mouthed NP we hear today. [Laughter.] They created that over a period of 40 years, consistently doing that kind of thing. They think that within six years - only six years - we can magically turn around the situation. We cannot do that. It is said that any mule - like the NP - can break any door anywhere, but that it takes a good carpenter to repair one. We are the carpenters. [Laughter.] [Applause.] We are repairing the doors that they broke. We have in place a budget of approximately R995 million to attend specifically to those colonial shacks that they left when they lost power in 1994. We are rebuilding those police stations.
In the course of last year alone, over 30 new police stations were built in this country. [Applause.] We are in the process of building those police stations, and we are going to ... n[Interjections] ... How many did the NP build in over 40 years in power? [Laughter.] They built nothing. They left nothing. We are starting from scratch. In fact, we are not starting from scratch, but from a total zero. Scratch is better because there is something that one can call scratch. [Laughter.] There is absolutely nothing. It is a void. We are starting from a void.