Chairperson, according to the recent written reply by the Minister of Social Development, 8% of children under the age of five years in South Africa are severely malnourished. Of these, 13% are found in KwaZulu-Natal and another 10% in the Northern Cape.
A quarter of such children live in these two provinces. According to a report released by the University of Cape Town's Children's Institute in 2010-11, as many as 6,8 million children were living on households without on-site access to clean drinking water.
In 2008, the Child Gauge Report showed that almost 3 million of the country's 18,6 million children went to bed hungry. In other words, one out of every six children went to bed hungry. An additional report by the Food Bank shows that one out of every five South Africans does not know where the next plate of food will come from; that is 20%.
This is a shocking state of affairs, made worse by the fact that little has been done to find the solution to the problem. Consequently, millions of children are dying because of malnutrition. This is utterly disgraceful.
How can a country blessed with such abundance and wealth allow its future to be compromised in this callous manner? What an indictment this is on the government which, this year alone, has wasted as much as R30 billion on fruitless and wasteful expenditure, as Willie Hofmeyer has pointed out.
The government has ridden to high office on the backs of the people, promising them a better life. Thank you. [Time expired.] [Applause.]