Hon Chairperson, hon Ministers and Deputy Ministers, MECs present, hon Members of Parliament and distinguished guests in the gallery, good afternoon.
Chairperson, as a movement dedicated to transformation, the ANC's 1955 Freedom Charter called for sport to be available to all South Africans irrespective of race, class and gender. However, the implementation of any full-blown transformation plan requires an adequate and sizeable budget to match the task. After all, the Department of Sport and Recreation is tasked with a broad range of responsibilities linked to national sports management, delivery and funding, all within the frame of the ANC's transformation agenda.
Finding the balance between sports delivery and transformation is not easy when you are working within a constrained budget that must fund the backlog of infrastructure created deliberately by the apartheid regime.
Facilities are lacking in most provinces, but mostly in rural areas, where facilities are also inaccessible to the poor and people cannot play their sport of choice. In fact, rural areas represent the poorest of the poor, and development of such areas is aimed at redressing inequality.
The challenge with infrastructure delivery is that building sports facilities also requires them to be maintained, otherwise they fall apart and then cost of fixing them is higher than their original cost.
When you go to a disadvantaged community, you will find that the local school does not have space for a sports field and there is no funding for sport infrastructure. The funding structure for sport and recreation facilities is complex and involves three different departments such as the Departments for Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, of Basic Education and of Sport and Recreation. In all cases, where service delivery is slow, the poorest schools suffer as a result.
The challenge began when the funding of the Department of Sport and Recreation was amalgamated with the Municipal Infrastructure Grant, MIG, in 2003. The steady decline in the delivery of facilities is because municipalities that have their own historical backlogs are diverting the MIG fund towards basic services and not sporting facilities.
In order to reverse this trend, the National Sport and Recreation Plan has called for 15% of the Urban Settlements Development Grant to be ring-fenced for building sport and recreation facilities.
Such initiatives are aimed at balancing the disparities between urban areas, where there are far more sporting facilities and fewer needy people, and rural areas. We commend the Department of Sport and Recreation for spending more on rural areas this year and planning to do so in the future.
There is an amount of R9,3 million that will go towards building sport and recreation facilities for all sectors of society this year. However, this budget will be absorbed by the backlogs created by the apartheid legacy, hence the department is currently conducting a survey of and verifying sport and recreation facilities in each province.
The facilities audit intends to clarify the number of facilities that exist; the type of facilities; and the primary needs, including their location, in each municipality. In this way, the department will be able to ensure that there are norms and standards for their delivery.
Management and maintenance plans for recreational facilities have been developed to address this backlog. These plans will be supporting the provision of sustainable sport and recreation infrastructure.
This process has revealed the substandard and inferior nature of the infrastructure inherited from the previous regime. The department cannot be expected to develop a winning nation or high-performance sportsmen and sportswomen if there are no sporting facilities.
As the ANC is the first party to open the doors of sport to all, it has also fallen on the Department of Sport and Recreation to uncover all the challenges and provide solutions for the future of our nation. The ANC supports the Budget Vote.