Hon Chairperson, hon Ministers, hon MECs, hon members, traditional leaders, representatives of organised agriculture and the private sector, ladies and gentlemen, we have here some very important guests that I need to acknowledge. The first are a group of young people who are part of the 8 000-strong National Rural Youth Service Corps. They are here as our guests. [Applause.] We also have a 95-year-old man, Oom Veertjie, from Witzenberg. We met this old man when we visited Prince Albert Hamlet in Witzenberg. [Applause.] I won't go through the story, hon Chair. The story is written briefly in a paragraph reflecting how we met him, what the conditions were and what has happened since we met him. You can see now that he is lively and happy. He is an old man who lives with his daughter and son-in-law, who only visit him during the weekends. I can see that he is lively.
Hon Chair, we have just come out of local government elections which emphasise the importance of service delivery. As a department, we think that because we are, or should be, very close to the poorest of the poor who voted; we should recognise that.
Secondly, we want to emphasise once more that in regard to land reform the three fundamentals remain: deracialisation of the rural economy; democratic and equitable allocation and use of land across gender, race and class; and sustained production discipline for food security for all.
Insofar as rural development is concerned, we continue with the three indicators, being to meet basic human needs; enterprise development in rural areas; and small-scale industries sustained or underpinned by markets and credit facilities.
We would like to refer very briefly to the progress we have made to date. It is very important for us to do that because some of the decisions we have taken and actions we have embarked upon have had a bearing on the budget.
Hon Chairperson, we have reorganised and rationalised the "back office", including rationalising the Commission on Land Restitution. We have done that because we wanted to ensure that we sharpen our performance and, therefore, service delivery to people.
It is important for us to recognise that part of the challenge with restitution has been the parallelism that we find between the commission and the department. We needed to rationalise and streamline that relationship to ensure that there is effective service delivery and accountability. The effect of this rationalisation is therefore that the accounting officer continues to be the accounting officer in the full sense of the word, whilst the Chief Land Claims Commissioner is the responsible official.
With regard to service delivery, we have looked at our credibility and recognised that over the years there have been challenges with land reform, particularly land that has been redistributed to people and is lying fallow. We are on record as having said that approximately 10% of that land is productive.
We have mentioned before and we now report that the Recapitalisation and Development Programme is on course. It's working very well. As a result, we can confidently say that because we have a strategy now, there are partnerships with commercial farmers who are willing to get on board with us. Secondly, we have the Recapitalisation and Development Fund. We think that the programme is working pretty well, but we still have to improve on it.
We also have a mandate over revitalisation of small rural towns. In the policy speech we present two particularly important examples in this regard. We present Prince Albert Hamlet, which I referred to earlier on and from where Oom Veertjie comes, and Dysselsdorp. Dysselsdorp is a good example of what could be defined as an emergent, vibrant, equitable and sustainable community, whilst Witzenberg is a very good example of what could be achieved by young people, given the opportunity, support and back- up.
We present a special programme with the young people sitting up there, the National Rural Youth Service Corps, Narysec, which has enlisted 7 958 youngsters between the ages of 18 and 35 since 1 September last year. The 50-50 principle applies. Also, every fourth person should be a person with disability. We are indebted to Disabled People South Africa for support in this regard in ensuring that we get more and more young people enrolled in the programme. Possibly some hon members might have observed this when watching AgriTV in the morning. This is a programme in which youngsters are on a stipend. They go through training and a programme, and this programme is not at all linked to any political organisation. It is purely meant to develop the character of young people to take responsibility among young people in society and build skills so that over a period of internship they can become para- professionals. Some of them might even become full-blown professionals.
Through the pilot programme, 500 of the youngsters have already gone through non-military army training for two months. Because we have people with disability, we have, with one Mrs Sibisi from KwaZulu-Natal, piloted the training of young people in craft. We are convinced that if we can contract her to train these young people with disability, who cannot go to the army, they can become entrepreneurs in their own right and create and establish their own craft enterprises and related commercial ventures.
We are participating in disaster management to a small extent and are particularly focusing on emergency housing, using steel and sandbag technology. This we have done in various small communities and we have listed some of them there, and also some accessories, particularly using the green economy.
Access to water remains a huge challenge, because even one of the many big programmes that we are running, at Muyexe, is always dented by this lack of access to clean water, much as we have provided. We have revived existing boreholes and drilled eight new ones. There is water, but the quality of the water is poor. So, water remains a problem. We are happy to report here that our sister department in Limpopo has started a pipeline from Nandoni Dam to Muyexe. We hope that once that is completed, it will make a difference.
Hon Chair, we are also facing some fraudulent activities in the Deeds Office in Pretoria and in some land reform programmes in certain provinces. In order to deal with these, we successfully persuaded the President to authorise the appointment of the Special Investigating Unit to follow up on them. This process has started and a couple of officials have been arrested and charged. [Applause.] Hon Chair, the details of some of these are there in the report. But with regard to the one that I have just mentioned, there are no details there because of its sensitive nature. We will provide reports to the House on an ongoing basis.
We have also started a process of social contracting with stakeholders. We have been meeting with them and since November we have had a number of consultative workshops where we have discussed policy, strategy, legislation and operations of the department.
We have also heard from farmers themselves, how they are experiencing this work that we are doing. On that we have had very important feedback. Commercial farmers are of the view that we should appoint strategic partners, particularly mentors. Most of the time we appoint farmers who have failed in their own ventures. The point of view of the beneficiaries is that the selection of beneficiaries has been flawed. People who are neither interested nor have the ability and passion to farm are selected. So, both groups have requested that they be part of the selection processes and we have agreed, because we think that these criticisms are valid. We are establishing a national reference group which will work out the modalities with us.
Moving forward quickly, hon Chair, with regard to priorities we have to fill vacant posts. You will notice in the policy speech in the report that we say that the department has underspent by 2,3% which is R171 million, mainly because we have rationalised the staff, as you will find in the Treasury report. We have inherited more than 4 000 warm bodies. Probably about 50% of those are relevant to the mandate of the department. We are trying to restructure and reorganise the department. So, we are looking for horses for courses. We couldn't employ more people, even though we had applied for funds to fill vacant posts. We needed to restructure and then move on. We are hoping that this year this problem will be something of the past.
Outcome 7 in our department is for building "vibrant, equitable and sustainable rural communities". We are on course with that. It has five outputs and one of them is food security. We are working very hard on ensuring that we are relevant. We don't have a one-size-fits-all approach to development in rural areas. Therefore, we will continue with household and community profiling. The cutting edge of that will particularly be the National Rural Youth Service Corps - the youngsters there - who will be doing that. We are intending to reach out to 50% of rural communities, of the 108 rural wards, over the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, MTEF, period.
With regard to the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme, CRDP, we have developed a draft Norms and Standards Schedule and have started consulting with some departments, particularly the National Planning Commission, looking at how we can agree on norms and standards with regard to the development programme. We know that infrastructure backlogs are endemic in the countryside, but we don't have a cost estimate and the extent to which there are backlogs. That is why we want to have norms and standards, as well as cost estimates put in place so that we can begin to plan and prioritise properly.
We have some big projects that we are embarking upon. There are the Nelson Mandela Legacy Bridge and other infrastructure projects. That bridge is going to start at the end of July. We have done all the technical and engineering work and are waiting for the Eastern Cape province to give us a record of decision. We are ready to start at any time now, but we have scheduled the end of July with the engineers. It will cost R100 million and at peak it is going to employ 300 people over a period of 24 months. We also have similar low-water bridges that we shall build in a number of provinces - two in Mpumalanga, two in Limpopo and one in the Eastern Cape. In fact, that is an addition to this one, which leads to the bridge over the Mbhashe River.
With regard to food security our stakeholders have agreed that all land reform farms should be 100% productive. We have put aside R3,3 billion for land reform, R2 billion of which will go to strategic acquisition of land and the rest will ensure that farms are farmable and are productive.
We have R2 billion for restitution, which is a very small amount of money, given the challenges that we are facing in this regard. We will engage with all stakeholders, including commercial farmers, rather landowners - current landowners - and beneficiaries, to try to find the solution.
We have good examples here, such as the Mondi memorandum of understanding, MoU, and we are meeting Sappi soon to discuss their own situation in terms of our model. We met with Sugar SA in KwaZulu-Natal. All of this really shows you that South Africans are ready to make their own contribution across the colour line in terms of ensuring that we solve these problems which are apparently intractable.
We are going through other things which I am not going to mention here, which are normal agri-paths that we have been talking about.
Regarding rural roads and infrastructure, they are why we have young people here. We want these young people to construct the roads. That is why they go through training with the army. The army has the technical skills and know-how to train them. Together with the army, we have committed ourselves to taking back the first 500 who went through two months' training to go through a further four and half months' training in construction and artisanal skills - plumbing, welding and so on. That is so that we can then put them in the field and they can work under supervision for the remaining 18 months of their contract with us. We are hoping that we will soon have this group released and working in the field.
We actually do participate in disaster management, particularly in rural areas, focusing on steel and sandbag technology in emergency houses. This is something which is very small, but it helps us to develop the techniques to help our people when they are hit and are vulnerable to national disasters like lightning.
We will go on and deal with improvement of our professional capacity and support to the department and Deeds Office in ensuring that we further curb corruption and fraud. Of course, the implementation of the e-Cadastre is to ensure that we have proper information with regard to land parcels that we own, including auditing state land over the next three years. We are hoping that by 2014 we will complete that so that we can have a register of state- owned land and privately owned land in the country.
The Green Paper is on course. We submitted it to Cabinet and Cabinet advised correctly that we should separate rural development from land reform. Land reform is very sensitive and it could take us a little bit of time to get to a point where we all agree. The key elements of what was presented to Cabinet, the Green Paper, which we also indicated in the House, both in the 2009-10 and in the 2010-11 financial years, remain.
With regard to the three-tier land tenure system that we are proposing - the Land Management Commission, the Valuer-General's office and the Land Tenure Security Bill - it is piloting agri-villages. We have been discussing this matter and I am happy that we are moving forward with it and we will come back to Cabinet very soon with the two Green Papers - one on rural development and the other one on rural reform. We are finalising those now.
Of course, we are also working on the Land Protection Bill, which will come up with specifics with regard to precarious tenure in so far as it affects foreigners owning land in the country. There are other Bills that are in the offing, such as the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Bill, which is a programme that is being pushed by ourselves and other departments, including the National Planning Commission.
We wish to thank the President and Deputy President for their guidance and support - as you are well aware, land is a very emotive and sensitive issue. It is only through the kind of support that we are receiving from them that we can keep on going relentlessly towards achieving the mandate given this government by the majority of South Africans.
The department's tactical thrust remains one of implementing the CRDP in a manner which will make the country realise its vision of vibrant, equitable and sustainable rural communities. Thank you. [Applause.]