Chairperson, hon Minister, hon Deputy Minister, hon members, what we want from this department as Cope is service delivery, not drama. With so many officials acting and the dramatic tension being so high, the department can easily rival Isidingo for entertainment value. However, this debate is to approve funds for the department to deliver on its mandate, and that is what we are demanding.
Cope is also concerned about the article which appeared in the Sowetan on Monday regarding the Council for the Built Environment, CBE, and more specifically the Engineering Council of South Africa, ECSA. If newly qualified black engineers are being held back by ECSA, as it is being alleged, the Minister must inform this House what he has done to remove the bottleneck.
We are also interested to know when ECSA and CBE will start to reflect the greater demographic representativity. With regard to government's promise of many years to use the state's assets to transform property industry and spatial development planning so that it bears the mark of the new democracy, we need the Minister to disclose what has been happening in this regard. In 2007 the department also undertook to make available state assets to support the country's housing backlog. To what extent has this been happening? In the same year, the Government Immovable Asset Management Act was legislated to provide for a uniformed framework for the management of immovable assets; the co-ordination of their use to achieve service delivery objectives; and to set guidelines and minimum standards regarding asset management.