Chairperson, if we were not in this House I would not answer a question from the DA on FET colleges. But as a disciplined member of the House I will, because we invited them to the FET College Summit.
They did not come and they did not even apologise. Maybe that is the reason why hon James has been removed from the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education and Training.
It is very frustrating that you only shout at us through the newspapers but run away from real engagement on the ground, because you want to opportunistically grandstand. Nevertheless, I will answer your question.
The issue is that what we were indicating then was that they should be patient with us whilst we were going through the processes that we were going through. This is because the FET colleges were asking us: How are we to plan for next year?
We said that there are processes in place; the one being the summit, and the second being the engagement with Treasury - so that after them we would then be able to know exactly what would happen. We do intend to expand. Especially, we want to identify those colleges that have additional capacity whilst we are putting in place other measures to actually address the many challenges that we face in the sector. Ngiyabonga. [Thank you.]