Hon Deputy Speaker, hon Deputy President, Ministers and colleagues, may I at the outset express my personal condolences to the family of Professor Kader Asmal. I remember first meeting him in 1990, some 20 years ago, when he shared with a few of us his political vision for South Africa. I worked quite closely with him when I was Member of Executive Council, MEC, for Agriculture and later MEC for Education. I found him to be a very forthright gentleman who always taught us younger people what to do and the way we should do it. I am sending my heartfelt condolences to his family. May his soul rest in peace.
I rise on behalf of the IFP to support the Appropriation Bill that has been tabled, albeit that we have some concerns about some of the Votes and the manner in which some of the departments are spending, or underspending, their funds.
Colleagues who have spoken before me have highlighted some of the areas of underexpenditure and certainly it is cause for concern when 16 years into democracy and having an established public service we still find that public servants, who are entrusted with the task of ensuring that they carry out the mandate of the ruling party and the responsible Minister, do not spend the money as they should.
Areas of concern include - and I want to emphasise these - the mud schools that we still have. I think the hon Minister in the Presidency and the President himself saw many mud schools in the Eastern Cape. This is something we should not be having in 2011, if only officials applied themselves correctly and used resources where they were intended to be used.
I remember very clearly when the former Minister, Barbara Hogan, when she was chairperson of the Standing Committee on Appropriations, talked about the unspent money for the Hospital Revitalisation Grant. This was probably six or seven years ago and it is occurring even today. We know that many members of our community are exposed to very harsh conditions when they go to hospitals. I think it is a sin that money that has been assigned and appropriated, paid by the taxpayer and diligently collected by South African Revenue Services, Sars, is not spent in this crucial area.
Hon Minister of Finance, another area of concern in the appropriations will be what the hon Ramatlakane and hon Swart referred to, namely the outstanding land claim cases. Let alone the 365 outstanding land claim cases and no appropriation for what may happen or may not happen, there are a number of claims that still have not been gazetted. I think this is going to be a time bomb as we move into the future and when we see more and more claims and contestations coming up and less money being appropriated to this particular arena.
Having said that, I think we need to remind ourselves as Members of Parliament that we always talk about the role of Parliament vis--vis the role of the executive but sometimes we forget that the Money Bills Amendment Act, which was signed into law in 2009, allows us as Members of Parliament to propose amendments to Votes. This is contained quite clearly in subsections (4) and (5) of section 10 of the Money Bill Amendment Procedure and Related Matters Act. But to date none of the portfolio committees have used this mechanism to come to the Appropriations Committee and inform the committee that they have concerns about the Votes in particular, departments, and that they would like to propose amendments and propose conditionalties.
I suppose one of the reasons for that is what we heard few days ago by the hon Speaker. He said that we still don't have an established parliamentary budget office. When we have this independent office, that will empower us as Members of Parliament to be able to interrogate the Votes of departments more clearly.
The other thing that we don't have is standing rules. We need to develop standing rules in terms of sections 57 or 70 of the Constitution that will lay out a plan for portfolio committees to interact with Committees on Appropriations, so that when we come to this House we can speak in this debate on consideration of the Appropriation Bill about amendments that have been proposed.
Unfortunately, the Standing Committee on Appropriations, of which I am part, only dealt with six departments and asked them about the way they are spending or not spending. I think we need to be more vigilant, we need to accelerate our role, we need to have more oversight over the executive and then we could say to the country that we have been sent here as Members of Parliament and we are carrying out our duty in terms of the prescribed laws of this land. Once again, we will support this Appropriation Bill. Thank you.