Hon House Chair and hon members, the ANC welcomes the tabling of the Division of Revenue Amendment Bill [B17 - 2011] as required by section 12(4) of the Money Bills Amendment Procedure and Related Matters Act, Act 9 of 2009. This Bill is being tabled in the context of a challenging world economic outlook, which has continued to perform below par since 2008. On the other hand, South Africa is faced with the daunting task of addressing inequality, unemployment and underdevelopment. Therefore, effective distribution strategies have been adopted.
Despite these huge challenges, South Africa has made considerable advances in its quest for the attainment of a quality life for all its citizens, including the poor. Ours is a caring government, as can be seen from the tools of intervention that government employs, for example the quick response in providing funds for the repair of damaged infrastructure, from housing to roads, schools, clinics, farms and so forth, as well as the number of people who are receiving welfare grants. The Bill makes provision for additional funds for higher than budgeted for wage agreements across provinces. We must applaud the resources made available for staff at Further Education and Training, FET, colleges so that their posts become permanent posts, thus ensuring that FET college deliver on their mandate.
Also welcome is the breaking up of the infrastructure grant to provinces in order to establish the education infrastructure grant and health infrastructure grant, as well as the roads and transport and agriculture infrastructure grants. This includes the allocation of R700 million for school backlogs. This grant grows to R5,1 billion over the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, MTEF, so that mud and dangerous schools become a thing of the past.
An amount of R73 billion is budgeted for the Expanded Public Works Programme, EPWP, over the MTEF to create "short and longer-term jobs". A lot of monitoring is required for this grant to ensure that there is value for money. The grant continues to be spent slowly, especially in the provinces, except for KwaZulu-Natal. The Portfolio Committee on Public Works and the Standing Committee on Appropriations carried out separate oversight visits to KwaZulu-Natal in order to learn best practice. In short, we found that in KwaZulu-Natal the EPWP item is a standing item on the agenda of the provincial cabinet and therefore departments are required to report on the progress of job creation in cabinet meetings. If the other eight provinces could adopt this approach, expenditure would improve tremendously.
The national Department of Public Works should also look at the design of the programme. Again, we have requested National Treasury and the national Department of Public Works to look at the design of various categories of municipalities, in order to improve productivity at that level.
Though government has introduced the Infrastructure Delivery Improvement Programme, where technical advisers are deployed to assist with building a skills base that enables infrastructure units to overcome blockages to protect implementation, the reality of the matter is that there is room for improvement in infrastructure delivery. Parliament must ...
... commend government for shifting the composition of spending to support higher levels of infrastructure maintenance and capital expenditure, as such investment will promote economic growth and job creation, and support an enabling environment for further investment by the private sector.
The ANC supports the Division of Revenue Bill, as introduced by the Minister. [Applause.]