Speaker, allow me to thank the hon Raphuthi from the ANC for raising a very important matter following the judgment and conviction of a serial rapist and murderer in the North Gauteng High Court yesterday. This is a demonstration in action of our courts being committed to ensuring that no one who terrorises our communities, our society, goes unpunished. We want to applaud the many committed and dedicated public prosecutors who are working tirelessly, battling it out in court every day to ensure that they raise the conviction levels in our court system.
I also want to seize this opportunity, with your permission, Speaker, to respond to a statement from Agang relating to corruption in our country. As government, we are committed to fighting corruption as we confront it. We have established, for example, the anticorruption task team, which is a partnership between our prosecuting authority, the Hawks and other crime- fighting agencies in government to up the tempo in the fight against corruption specifically.
We are also heeding the call by the ANC which, at its conference in 2012, clearly mandated us to expand the net against corruption to include private sector corruption. We are ensuring that, through various interventions, we clean up the private sector, so that it is free of corruption, because it is not only in the public sector that corruption is practiced. In fact, it is usually people in the private sector who ensure that there is corruption in the public sector by being the corruptors who entice public officials to participate in corrupt activity. I thank you. [Applause.]