Chairman, recently I stood up in this House to express my deep concern and anxiety about the lack of certain medicines in Free State public hospitals and clinics. If the President had been in this House then, he would have certainly shared my concern. It has not been so with members of his party on the other side who hackled me instead of supporting me. Worse still, the hon Minister in the Presidency: National Planning Commission, rising in response, declared to the House that what I had said was old news. Unfortunately, the situation today is as I had depicted it then.
The crisis started a while ago, but nevertheless remains an unresolved crisis even now. The ARVs that were unavailable last year still remain unavailable to queues of patients today. People who may have continued to live are now going to die because of an administration that has gotten its priorities wrong. It is immoral for the province to be spending R25 million on Letlaka Communications to bring out a weekly newspaper to sing only the praises of the premier and some of his MECs.
Furthermore, the province has allocated R45 million to the Mangaung African Cultural Festival - Macufe - and this vast amount of money will be jived away by the end of this month. Do people's lives count for nothing? Is self- promotion and self-gratification more important to the elite in the ruling alliance than meeting the most urgent and dire needs of the people.
There is a clear moral choice to be made between what is nice to have and what must be had and between spending on jiving and surviving. Macufe must ... [Time expired.] [Applause.]