Thank you, Madam Chair. This colloquium happened more than a year ago, at the beginning of 2013, so it's long overdue to come to the House. It was put on the Announcements, Tablings and Committee Reports again last week. I would really recommend that members on both sides of the House please go and read the report, because it gives a very revealing and frank insight into what is really ailing the manufacturing sector in South Africa.
Nearly every single one - in fact, I think it was every single one - of the presenters who came and presented to the committee during the days of the colloquium made the point that the biggest inhibitor of the manufacturing factor in South Africa is the administered prices: specifically the price of electricity, the price of our ports and the price of rail transport around the country.
Now, it is true, as the hon Fubbs says, that we were able to secure a very marginal concession on the price of our port charges during the colloquium. We thank Transnet and the National Ports Authority for that. However, the fact remains that South Africa still has some of the, if not the most expensive, inefficient and slow ports in the world. As long as that remains the case, we really cannot hope to be a global export leader.
In regard to electricity, Chairperson, as I said, nearly every presenter listed electricity as a huge inhibitor of the manufacturing sector. Last week Eskom once again called on major industrial users to reduce consumption by 10%. This is very bad news for mining houses, smelters and all manufacturers in an economy that already has 25,5% unemployment. When you are trying to foster manufacturing and you tell your manufacturers that they have to reduce their electricity usage, in a sector which is the biggest user of electricity in South Africa, then that really makes manufacturing growth an impossibility.
Let me just make one point now that I won't need make in the debate that is coming up after this one. The government is looking into investing nearly R1 trillion in a Russian nuclear energy deal. Let me say that the end-user price of that electricity is going to be so prohibitive that it will kill off any effort to grow manufacturing in this country. If every manufacturer came to Parliament and said electricity prices were the number one challenge they faced as manufacturers, and then you told them that the price of electricity was going to go up significantly as a result of the nuclear deal, then really the debate on beneficiation is completely moot.
So, government needs to decide whether it is serious about manufacturing, and it needs to look at the prices it already controls, if it wants to give some assistance and subsidy to the manufacturing sector. It must not go and control prices in the private sector, as it proposes to do in the report that we are about to debate. Thank you. [Applause.]
HON MEMBERS: Hear, hear!