Thank you, Chair. I want to thank all members who contributed to this debate. I sat here as a representative of the provincial government and listened to you regarding all the issues you raised.
However, I want to raise a few issues in relation to what the hon member Robinson raised in this House. Firstly, she spoke about the issue of mismanagement. Quite clearly, as Minmec, we did take the position that we had nothing to hide, hence the step taken by the Minister in asking the Auditor-General to investigate any issues. When that is tabled, we are going to make our own pronouncement on those issues. We have to move away from making allegations that are not substantiated.
She went further and spoke about announcements and targets not met, and I want to respond to that. I think the ID member raised the issue about the pilot project, and there is a lot to learn from that. Just to demonstrate, without being pressured and without being asked, one of the key lessons that we have learned from this relates to the issue of the capacity of municipalities.
The City of Cape Town proved not to have the kind of capacity to drive and implement housing delivery. That is the reason why the Minister appointed Thubelisha to drive this project, because, quite clearly, the City of Cape Town over all these years was only able to deliver, as I said, fewer than 7 000 houses. And here you had a project that wanted to deliver 22 000 houses.
Thubelisha has been appointed and this is part of a key lesson that we have learned. So, if you talk about issues that concern targets and the slow pace, I think you have to go back to see how you can help this city. These are not issues that come from the Minister or ourselves. We are putting things in place to improve that capacity. So I don't think this can be an issue that you can raise here and score some points on.
I think you have also made the point that work began before contracts were signed. So what? [Laughter.] Clearly, I stood here and made the point that this is a pilot project. This is a pilot project in which we are testing a number of issues. We are testing the pace of what we want to do and deliver with speed. [Interjections.] We are testing many other things, so if it happened that we laid the first brick before a contract was signed, I again ask: so what, because today you have those houses standing there?
Everything else we did, we are very convinced we did within legal means. It is a pilot project. Every inspection was done. Everything was done. It is a pilot project and that we can attest to. We are saying that we are going to have people occupying those homes without any problems. [Interjections.] That's important, therefore, that when you come ...