Mr Speaker, when President Zuma took office in 2009, he inherited a relatively small government debt, compared to the size of our economy. We had just emerged from a prolonged period of economic growth.
However, Mr Speaker, President Zuma faced a new challenge. The global economy headed into stormy waters with the collapse of the financial markets in the West. And we all agreed that government should take action to soften this blow. Since then, Mr Speaker, President Zuma has presided over the greatest expansion of government spending in our nation's history, and the result is that our debt is likely to reach levels close to those we had in the early 1990s.
The DA is of the view that the investment in infrastructure that the President proposes is a very good idea indeed. We welcome his invitation to involve the private sector and the substantial equity it commands. This will be a considerable stimulus to achieve the high growth we need to provide the revenues to repay the debt. However, Mr Speaker, this is not enough.
President Zuma also spoke at length about the success in improving education. Yet, as I speak now, many children sit without their workbooks. There are provinces without new textbooks because some did not bother to order them on time and the province of Limpopo did not order them at all.
There are thousands of children who went back to mud schools in the Eastern Cape, despite the fact that Treasury has diligently and consistently provided enough money to replace them. Mr President, the initiative to replace mud schools did not come from your government. It did not come from the Eastern Cape education department. It came from the poor parents in deep rural Eastern Cape who took your government to court and won.
Speaker, the President referred to the improvement in the overall matric pass rate, but failed to point out that the pass rate for mathematics, science and some languages is a travesty. As a result, our universities failed to find enough students who can reach the high-end engineering and technical skills your investment in infrastructure development requires.
How is it, Mr President, that you never mentioned our universities? You never mentioned science-led innovation and the knowledge economy, even though your planned investments in broadband and cellular communication infrastructure required your doing so? Minister Pandor mentioned it today, and we thank her for that.
Speaker, I was shocked to hear President Zuma thanking all teachers' unions for their co-operation in improving the education of our children when we know full well how the power hungry SA Democratic Teachers' Union, SADTU, wilfully sacrifices schooling on the altar of material greed, despite their socialist rhetoric. In the Eastern Cape, where matric pass rates are the lowest, SADTU concluded a go-slow.
I was appalled at President Zuma's misrepresentation of the Grade 10 dropout rate and his gratuitous singling out of the best performing province, the Western Cape, based on a selective reading of the material, including the 2008 to 2010 General Household Survey, GHS.
So, tell us, Mr President, how will we achieve high economic growth without declaring education to be in crisis and ramping up our grossly underperforming school system? Tell us, Mr President, how we will achieve high growth without an emergency skills programme for the technical trades to provide the talented young people without whom your plan will fail. Tell us, Mr President, how we will achieve high growth without large-scale ideas- based innovation at universities, our science councils, and research and development in the private sector.
To quote a well-known Russian revolutionary, "What is to be done?" This is what needs to be done. We need to train more and better science and mathematics teachers. We need to pull talented retired science and mathematics teachers out of retirement. We should recruit mathematics and science teachers internationally and relax our immigration requirements accordingly.
We should rapidly rebuild our teacher training colleges. Education faculties, we know, have the least status at any university. Start the exercise in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape and build the two planned universities for those provinces on that basis.
Withdraw the misguided effort of the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, to take control of the further education and training colleges. His department lacks the capacity to look after these colleges. Link every school into the national broadband backbone driven by President Zuma's investments in infrastructure. Minister Pandor referred to that, and I thank her for that too. Train all teachers in-service to use the most modern information and communication technology there is.
Oblige all trade unions and professional associations, by law, to spend at least half of the funds they receive from payroll deduction on teacher training, development and services. Mr Speaker, SADTU collects R120 million a year through payroll deduction, and this will be much better spent on teacher development than on big cars, large offices, cadre deployment staff, generous travel allowances and large strike funds.
Devote a significant part of infrastructure spend to ensure that universities have state-of-the-art libraries, science laboratories, intellectual property rights and technology licensing offices, lecture halls and residences. Ensure that our best academics are incentivised to be on top of their game and the best postgraduate students supported so that they never have to worry about where their next meal comes from.
Celebrate free, independent inquiry and analytically robust thinking. Make intellectual honesty a virtue. Eschew the politically correct nonsense that paralyses our nation's collective intellectual ability to find solutions to the problems we face, specifically poverty, unemployment and inequality. Mouthing slogans will not put bread into our people's mouths or create real jobs.
Speaker, why is it that other economies can grow at 6%, 7%, 8% or 9% and we can only stutter along at under 3%? The reasons are not mysterious. Read the National Development Plan. What this nation needs is a president with clarity of vision, conviction of steel and the courage to take tough decisions. Instead, we have Mr Nice Guy with a charming smile, the wrong man with the wrong job description for our times. Thank you very much. [Applause.]