As for the member of the UCDP, hon Mfundisi, please man, you are the last person to talk about patronage; not while your own party, the Mangope regime, was dishing out patronage in the whole of Mafikeng and so on, and building houses for the people just to keep the whole public service. So you should be the last person to talk about that issue.
Hon Mlambo, let me just share with you one little part of an anecdote. In 1994, I had the priviledge of serving on the Portfolio Committee on Public Enterprises. I was on an oversight visit to Esselpark to see the then chief executive officer, CEO, of Transnet, Dr Moolman. I asked him two questions and said: Dr Moolman, in which field of study did you obtain your doctorate? He said: Transport economics. The second question was: When did you join Transnet? He said: "You are not going to believe it. I joined Transnet at the age of 15. As a 15-year-old boy, I grew up here as part of this institution."
So this indicates the good example of what a state-owned enterprise can actually do. He mentored Saki Mocozoma, who subsequently took over. Nevertheless, the point is that those like Mr Alberts, who say that we must do away with affirmative action and that state-owned enterprises privatise themselves, are actually going against the grain. This because there is an abundance of evidence that indicates that these SOEs, if they are properly run, can become an incubator of human capital instead of our having to import expertise from overseas. An example in this regard is the case of Coleman Andrews, who came here and took a lot of money and left us with the mess that we have at the South African Airways. [Interjections.] So we should be able to advise our own people to use a plethora of these SOEs. They are about 500 or so in number.
A report of the Professional Regulating Commission, the PRC, is going to be presented to Parliament, with which the SOEs are going to be consolidated so that they can be run very, very efficiently.
This debate should be based on the context of an economic framework. You cannot be cherry-picking and saying executive salaries, executive salaries and executive salaries. You must look at the whole structure of the economy.
The ANC has created an economic policy that has an excellent framework. It hinges on two pillars. The first pillar is that of mixed economy. This mixed economy was crafted in the Harare Declaration, when the ANC leadership looked at the aspirations and the tenets of the Freedom Charter. They also looked at the reality of the transition into negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, Codesa, and put together this policy of mixed economy. It constituted one of the 34 principles on which this Constitution is based, and was adopted by all the parties at Codesa. So that is the major contribution made by the ANC towards this mixed economy in trying to deal with the difficult situation of the structure of the economy. [Interjections.]