Chairperson, well apart from the troglodytes in the Department of Labour and the Employment Equity Commission and the Black Management Forum who can't see what's going on around them and who seem to think that skills shortage is a myth created by white supremacists, the rest of us know that, in fact, there is a skills shortage in the country, and that at a municipal level this applies to both the administrative and the technical level.
We've heard already that many municipalities, far too high a percentage, are without municipal managers at all, or without chief financial officers, CFOs, and a far higher percentage where the MMs, municipal managers, and CFOs are, in fact, underqualified or unqualified.
There's a wonderful case you might like to hear about of a municipality in Limpopo which gave the position of CFO to the tea lady. Another one has outsourced 95% of its financial functions, because it can't find anybody to do the work.
On a technical level, just to remind ourselves: in the 1980s and the early 1990s there were 2 500 engineers working in municipalities. With the increased wall-to-wall municipal system, the current number is 1 300, half of what we had then.
So what do you expect out of all this? You get weak internal project management, declining water quality, inadequate sanitation and waste-water treatment and, of course, the potholes everywhere - and corruption and patronage.
So, we have a real problem here. Now, of course, the government acknowledges, fortunately, that it is partly to blame. The District Manager who is sitting there now said, in fact: We overestimated their political depth; we overestimated government experience and technical capacity at local government level. So what can be done now to solve the problem?
Well, the first thing we need to do, of course, is to approve the Bill that the two colleagues before me have mentioned that is before the House. Some of this should have been introduced years ago.