Deputy Chairperson, hon President, Chairperson of the NCOP, hon members of this House, our honoured guests from Nigeria, members of the SA Local Government Association, Salga, ladies and gentlemen, may I greet you all. Good afternoon.
The Eastern Cape remains firmly on course to achieve the goals set out in the manifesto of the ruling party, the ANC, which are: eliminating the scourge of crime; improving access to education and the quality of education; creating decent jobs for the people of our province; improving the health profile of our province; and developing our rural communities.
Following our election in April 2009, which heralded the beginning of our term, the fourth democratic term of governance in our country, we designed a provincial strategic framework aimed at providing a practical translation of our manifesto into a coherent programme for service delivery by the government.
Our provincial strategic framework is the provincial equivalent of the national Medium-Term Strategic Framework, and establishes the provincial priorities for the term. All of these are aligned to the manifesto, and display our commitment to changing the lives of the people of the province for the better, through speeding up growth and transforming the economy; creating decent work and sustainable livelihoods; building social and economic infrastructure; rural development; land and agrarian reform and food security; strengthening education; building a skills and human resource base; improving the health profile of the province; intensifying the fight against crime and corruption; building a developmental state; improving public services; strengthening democratic institutions; and, lastly, building cohesive, caring and sustainable communities.
As part of ensuring that our work is aligned to the national programme of action, work on the management of natural resources and matters pertaining to international relations has been integrated into these strategic priorities. The implementation of these priorities is moving full steam ahead, anchored by a reviewable annual programme of action.
Highlights of our performance with respect to the programme of action for the 2009-10 financial year already indicate that significant progress is being made. For example, the crafting of the provincial rural development strategy has been concluded. Work is under way to consolidate and merge all public entities in the province that have a rural development mandate to be under one provincial rural development agency.
In the state of the province address, we announced that a rural development fund will be established. This has been influenced by the words of Muhammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank founder, who once said:
In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the nonpoor in a programme, the nonpoor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measure are instituted right at the beginning. In such cases, the nonpoor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.
Therefore, for us, the rural development fund is intended to ensure that the poor determine their destiny, and are indeed their own liberators and are not pushed out by the nonpoor.
As part of the objective of building cohesive, caring and sustainable communities, we have facilitated the establishment of a provincial heritage resources authority with a view to fast-tracking the transformation of the province's cultural landscape in a manner that promotes nation-building, whilst at the same time deepening and strengthening national identity.
May I also indicate that our audit outcomes have significantly improved, with more departments receiving unqualified audit opinions. For example, for the 2008-09 financial year, eight provincial departments have received unqualified audits; three departments, namely economic development and environmental affairs, public works, and roads and transport, received qualified opinions; whilst two received adverse opinions, namely health and education.
Our efforts, therefore, in the quest to improve the institutional capacity of the state have been focused more on health, and on basic and higher education to ensure that next year we move those two departments to a state of qualified audit opinions. This is done with a view to moving them further, the following year, to unqualified audit opinions. We believe that we can do it. The past has proven that we are able to do that, and we will do it.
That will be our contribution to the campaign of the ruling party: to ensure that, by 2014, all our departments and municipalities receive unqualified audit reports. This is a quest to ensure that there is clean governance.
We also wish, as a province, to indicate and declare that we are ready to host the multitude of soccer fans who will converge on our province for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Our main host stadium in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan has been ready for quite some time now. We announced in the state of the province address that we will create, during this term, approximately 480 000 jobs, 60 000 of which will be created in this financial year.
Noting that my time is coming to an end, I wish, firstly, to indicate to the hon member who spoke just before me that for as long as we take societal ills as ills of the ruling party, we are going to hold this beautiful country of ours to ransom. [Applause.]
We were elected to give leadership to society and we are supposed to do just that. HON MEMBERS: Viva!