Mr Speaker, colleagues, guests in the gallery - there are three of them - thank you for giving me this time. Once again, our ANC-led activist Parliament undertook an oversight visit to a fishing community of the West Coast. The fishing communities, like farmworkers, work on a seasonal basis. At most, they work for four months, without any benefits like the UIF - Unemployment Insurance Fund - leave, pension or medical aid.
Besides this, these communities are prone to abuse of all sorts, such as alcohol, unwanted pregnancies, drugs, amongst other things. In addition to exploitative worker-owner relations - with the big industry players being Sea Harvest and Oceana, which we visited - these fisherfolks are subjected to co-option into companies that bid for applications of fishing rights, only to establish that they become fronts in the equation of such ownerships.
A case in point is a company called Kalahari Fisheries that has four white and six black owners, but only on paper. In practice, only the four white owners run and benefit from the fishing rights that this company has received from our own government. Recently, all the owners, including those that do not benefit, received correspondence from the SA Revenue Service indicating a collective debt of R600 000 to the receiver. Also, the company in question has been submitting tax clearance certificates to the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the validity of which Sars is questioning.
We look forward to engaging with these communities on an ongoing basis. Among other critical areas of importance ...