On a daily basis Parliament in the various committees is engaged in precisely this monitoring and evaluation of the departments that we are in, including members of the opposition in those committees, to try to find out whether they are making the impact they said they would and, if not, how they are implementing the recommended solutions from other monitoring departments and so on. We particularly appreciate the fact that the Auditor-General, Statistics SA and other similar institutions, especially the Office of the Public Service Commission for example, gather significant evidence, although this is not often put together in ways that can have immediate impact. So, we are hoping that your department, pulling together lessons drawn from that evidence, will lead in bringing improvements in the running of departments.
We are particularly excited because the departments that we are responsible for, such as the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, interact with provinces and municipalities, so their own state of health must reflect the kind of health we would like to see in the provinces and municipalities. The work that is going to be done by your department, sir, aims to deal with exactly that.
We are pleased about this mechanism of the President who incidentally, if I might state the blindingly obvious, is responsible for the co-ordination of all the Ministries he has appointed. We elected him to do that. So, it was correct that he should not only depend on the departments and Ministries that he has created in specific sectors, but that he should have a mechanism over and above the work they are doing to monitor and help bring out and tease out those interdependencies and interrelatedness issues that often fall between the cracks and that will improve the quality of impact on the ground. We appreciate that and therefore we will support this Budget Vote, not only rhetorically here, but in practice in collaboration with you, as we mobilise abahlali [residents] in all the townships of the country and the suburbs, wherever we are. This is what we will be agitating for, for them to interact with you to give meaning to the citizen-based monitoring and evaluation system that is in the making.