Hon Deputy Chairperson, hon President Baba Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, Chairperson of the NCOP Baba Mahlangu, Premier of the Free State province Baba Ace Magashule, all fellow premiers, MECs, Speakers, executive mayors and mayors, traditional leaders, Salga leadership, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I greet you all. Good morning.
The period since we came into office, deployed of course by the ANC, guided by the leadership of our hon President, about 18 months today, has been the most challenging, stimulating and rewarding period of our lives. We take pride in the fact that we, as a collective, have sought to understand our inherited challenges, devise strategic responses to those challenges and begin to see meaningful results. Leadership of such a large and complex project can never be easy, but when genuine progress becomes discernible, even after such a short period, it is indeed gratifying.
The challenges of poverty and underdevelopment, especially of the former Bantustans; unemployment and deindustrialisation, which has been exacerbated by the recent economic crisis; huge infrastructure and service backlogs; and service delivery challenges in both provincial and local government are well known.
Our response as provincial leadership has been a twofold strategy: firstly, to correct the inherent and systematic weaknesses in the state, focusing on health, education, local government and fiscal recovery.
Secondly, it is to address the structural weaknesses in the provincial economy through developing programmes and projects which, if resourced and implemented, will reposition the Eastern Cape on the new national growth path. These projects include the Coega transshipment hub, the Coega-Gauteng logistics corridor, the upgrade of the East London harbour, the Wild Coast N2 Development Corridor, the King Sabata Dalindyebo presidential project and the Umzimvubu water transfer scheme.
Another case in point where intersphere collaboration is working well is the King Sabata Dalindyebo Local Municipality intervention. In this intersphere collaboration a master plan for the economic hub of the region, which spans a 20-year horizon, has been developed. It addresses challenges and identifies 280 projects for implementation in various focus areas, as well as emphasising the need to approach the projects in an integrated and co-ordinated manner. It is worth mentioning that the importance of strengthening intergovernmental relations in order to bolster the principle and spirit of working together by all spheres of government is key.
Furthermore, the strategic goal of the turnaround in the Departments of Education and Health is to restore public and state trust in these departments. To reach this goal, the following objectives are being pursued, which are to eliminate corruption; to deliver on the departmental mandates in an effective and efficient manner; to employ appropriate capacity at both management and operational levels; and to achieve an unqualified audit opinion from the Auditor-General.
Already, as part of this turnaround, good progress has been made in easing the backlog in payments to service providers, identifying areas where huge savings have been made, and will continue to be made and improving the supply chain management contract and project management systems as part of addressing irregular and fruitless expenditure plaguing these two key departments.
In addition, disciplinary and criminal action has been instituted against many officials found to be complicit in these practices.
The process of establishing early childhood development centres, ECDCs, is progressing quite well, with 1 262 ECDCs being funded, benefiting 55 696 children. We have stabilised our school nutrition programme and currently 4 767 schools with 1,5 million learners are benefiting from that. Of these, 4 588 schools have been provided with cooking utensils and are on the cooked meals plan with 10 117 meal servers.
With regard to health care, there are now 31 community health centres implementing 24-hour services and 22 community health centres implementing 60% of the primary health care package in the province. The number of patients on antiretroviral treatment, ART, is now at 123 552, having tested 399 851 people as part of the HIV counselling and testing campaign. The TB cure rate is at 62,4% of TB patients that have been screened for HIV.
As you know, hon Deputy Chairperson, the Eastern Cape is largely a rural province. We are taking many positive steps towards making the lives of our rural communities better through integrated rural development initiatives and through putting in place rural development pilot sites in all districts of our province, taking on board the successes achieved at our first pilot site in Mhlontlo.
Next week, on 25 and 26 November in East London, we will be hosting our public sector transformation summit to drive home the message and reorientate our public servants in the various spheres of government to be part of the solution and not the problem in speeding up service delivery. Various build-up engagements have already taken place across the province to start addressing the mind-sets of employees to better serve the needs of our developmental state.
Several other notable service delivery achievements are: the province is progressing well with its Expanded Public Works Programme, EPWP, targets with the department creating a total of 22 294 work opportunities; we have completed our provincial industrial development strategy, which aligns well with the national government Industrial Policy Action Plan 2; and in the East London Industrial Development Zone, IDZ, four major investments have been completed - dairy worth R160 million, diamond polishing worth R150 million, mariculture worth R40 million and solar water heaters worth R120 million, which together will create 600 direct jobs and 1 000 indirect jobs. Furthermore, about 1 300 construction jobs have already been created in the IDZ.
The Eastern Cape government is committed to continuous improvement in the delivery of services to communities and stands firm in the belief that, through honesty and dedication in working together, we have achieved and shall continue to achieve more. The province is ensuring that the lessons learnt from the 2010 World Cup experience regarding the effective and efficient delivery of services are translated into current governance practices. We are mindful that a lot of work still lies ahead as we move towards the end of our current financial year. We would like to assure our President and the House at large that indeed the intersphere collaboration approach works well for the province, and has made us achieve more. Thank you, hon Deputy Chairperson. [Time expired.] [Applause.]