Hon Chairperson, the DA supports the contents of the report, especially considering that the oversight visit was premised upon serious concerns around the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme. The report serves to confirm the joint portfolio committees' worst fears and their experience of our in situ visits, and to reinforce the grave reservations relating to the sustainable and future success of the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme.
The oversight visits serve to entrench the fear that effective restitution, redistribution, rural development, and future food security are being compromised by questionable national and provincial implementation strategies. The conclusions of the report are candid and sobering, a sincere assessment of the dysfunctionality of strategies intended to deal with the legacy of oppression, dispossession, and disadvantage. The status of the progress with regard to restitution is in doubt due to unreliable and flawed data; land reform beneficiaries are floundering in a turbulence of debt that they neither understand nor are capable of servicing and dealing with. There is no effective pre- and post- settlement support for beneficiaries, many of whom have no inclination or passion to make a living from the land.
The collapse of extension training and support is directly responsible for this lamentable situation. The National Rural Youth Service Corps, Narysec, cannot and will not replace a knowledge-based extension service. The management of communal property association arrangements of beneficiary communities is riddled with fraud and corruption because there is neither credible nor reliable oversight and reporting on this form of communal ownership.
The recommendations are, I suppose, an endeavour to deal with all the issues that illustrate the fallibility of the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme. What concerns the DA is the fact that there are less than either credible or realistic endeavours to turn the situation around, and most of the deadlines have passed already. The recommendations and relevant timeframes are also unrealistic as these very serious issues remain unresolved and have continued to hamstring effective, efficient and economic rural development and job creation in rural communities for the past 18 years.
The imminent commemoration of the 1913 Natives, Land Act should have been incentive enough to ensure realistic rural development and land reform; yet the looming of this awful milestone has not served as an incentive to change and uplift the lives of the rural poor. The co-operation of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform and that of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has been suboptimal and lamentable in this regard.
Hon Chairperson, if this House passes reports with fine-sounding findings and legitimate and fine recommendations with no inclination or ability to deal with those recommendations timeously, we will again, next year, table a similar report and lament the fact that rural poor people remain poor and dependent on the ANC government's situation or pattern of patronage dispensation. We need to make sure that these two departments take the contents of this report into their planning to make sure that they can implement the recommendations of this House. Thank you, Chair. [Applause.]