House Chairperson, we have established a team composed of the National Treasury, the Departments of Local Government in the Provinces, our department which is lead by ourselves, wherein we are looking at the whole question of debt that is owed to municipalities. We have employed a person who's dealing with that at the highest level in the department. The person responsible for this is developing a strategy that is looking at debt management and revenue enhancement.
We hope that by December the strategy will be in place and everything will be there. There are a lot of views that are there to say maybe we should be looking at a situation whereby the debt is sold to the private sector. Our view is that the debt must be taken by the national government so that we are able to ensure that we assist municipalities in dealing with it.
We will be profiling the debt to know who owes municipalities in terms of government, in terms of the private sector and also households. And once that has been done and looked at by Cabinet, we will be able to take that to you to ensure that we move forward.
I want to conclude by saying that we want to look at the issues of debt in two forms: firstly, to curb the growth of debts; and secondly, to ensure that we are able to reduce it. In conclusion, we want to have a situation whereby we say the systems must be the same, they must talk to each other. We are saying one country, one President, and one system. Thank you.