Hon Chairperson, the MF congratulates the Minister of Finance on the award he received in India recently. We are proud of that.
We are very positive about the allocation of funds for youth employment skills development and the policy shift in respect of the provision of housing for those who belong to the middle-income group. The mistake South Africa must not make is digging deeper into becoming a state giving handouts rather than being a developmental state.
A lot of money should have been given to education for the expansion of the technical aspect and to where there is skills development. In a country where you have to import skilled workers and essential workers in the government service - about 800 000 - and you pay them 30% more than the normal wage, there is definitely something wrong with the direction of our education.
If you look at Gujarat in India, for example, every year they build more technical institutions and medical schools. The MF strongly believes that as far as education and training is concerned in our country, the public sector is playing its role, but the private sector is not.
We have made the mistake of spending billions on capital-intensive projects instead of on labour-intensive projects, and we are going to pay a heavy price.
No country has economic spin-offs after a World Cup. German economists have confirmed that. Korea, Japan and the United States all suffered. Our job must be to make sure that everyone in South Africa has a house and everyone is skilled. Where are the agrarian, economic and industrial revolutions? Black Economic Empowerment, BEE, does not mean that somebody who has a firm gets a contract and farms it out to other people. The construction and the manufacturing industries are important.
However, notwithstanding all of these concerns, the first Budget of the Minister of Finance is welcomed by the MF. Remember, in the MF's election manifesto, we demanded the following: Lifestyle and unaccounted-for enrichment checks, inspectors in education, and a planning commission. Sars is undertaking the lifestyle check, but add unaccounted-for enrichment checks and what we have developed is called "tenderpreneurship".
There is another industry that has become very important, and that is the knowledge industry. It is high time that our country moves away from race. Forty-two per cent of scientists in the USA are Indians, and they do not take a ruler and measure an affirmative action policy.
The majority of the players in the New Zealand team are black, but the New Zealand whites do not have a quota for blacks. South Africa is going race crazy. The world is grabbing qualified people and South Africa is chasing qualified people out of the country. Study the wise words and the advice of world-renowned Professor Ramphele.
From today onwards the knowledge industry must grow, and we must count the number of graduates and middle-class people we are producing. India's growth rate is what it is because of the knowledge industry. Qualified South Africans are getting e-mails from the US offering them jobs and asking when they can start, and in South Africa we parade matriculants. The MF will support the Bill. [Time expired.]