Madam Chairperson, Minister and Deputy Minister, every five years the electorate gives a mandates as to who should govern the country and mandates how our beautiful country will be governed. For this reason, all departments have to review their plans in line with the new mandate and the reconfigured priorities of the new government.
The Department of Public Works is a very important department that has a key role to play in helping the government to fulfil its promises and to provide a better life for all South Africans. The department's role, with regard to creating employment and stimulating the economy, is especially important now that we are in the midst of an economic crisis.
In his state of the nation address, President Jacob Zuma stated that the second phase of the EPWP aims to create about 4 million job opportunities by 2014 and 500 000 by December 2009. These are indeed lofty targets which we hope will be reached during the specified timeframes and distributed equitably to all sections of our population, regardless of political affiliation. The wellbeing of the construction industry is very important for the long- term growth of our economy. It is therefore vital to ensure that we have enough skilled people working within this industry, so training, bursaries and mentorship programmes are critical. The transformation of the construction industry must also continue at a brisk pace, including the promotion of previously disadvantaged groups within the industry, with a specific focus on women and the youth.
Small and emerging contractors must also be promoted and benefit from the opportunities that are present. These opportunities must be shared equitably, so there must be an efficient mechanism in place to ensure that the department's various initiatives such as the Construction Industry Development Programme and the Emerging Contractor Development Programme benefit as wide a range of people as possible and that opportunities that are presented are also shared equitably by many. They must not be reserved for a selected few.
Finally, the issue of service delivery will always feature prominently when dealing with government departments and institutions, especially the Department of Public Works. Therefore, the people that the department has in its employment will determine whether the objectives of the various programmes are achieved and that the ultimate success of the department is measured. The department also needs to quickly fill existing vacancies in time so that we are able to fulfil the objectives of the department to perform its duties at a high level.
Lastly, I also wish to draw your attention, Minister, to a very good programme undertaken by the City of Johannesburg in tarring all the streets of Soweto. As someone who was born in Soweto, I grew up in very dusty streets there. But there is a good programme that they did there in the last two years. The problem is that the development of all those tarred roads stops at every hostel gate, and there are about nine hostels in Johannesburg.
Therefore, apart from transforming and eradicating these hostels, we also need to convert them and do away with them because they are creations of apartheid and what was called influx control. Therefore, I will applaud the Department of Public Works if they can come in there and ensure that we deal with this legacy of apartheid once and for all. Thanks, Chairperson.
The DEPUTY MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS (Mrs H I Bogopane-Zulu): Madam Chair, let me firstly say that I will only be adding and clarifying some information on the tasks allocated to me as the Deputy Minister of Public Works. This will be confirmation that indeed I will not be carrying my Minister's bags, but that I will actually be doing lots of work. I believe everybody in the House will be judging me in my capacity as the Deputy Minister.
I would like to start my presentation with some words of wisdom that my daughter, who happens to also be visually impaired like me, wrote. She said that when I speak to the members I must tell them that the greater our diversity, the richer our capacity to create new visions. We must acknowledge our differences and we need to celebrate them as capacities rather than deficiencies. Life must be examined to be lived fully. It may be painful, but an enquiry can be the beginning of building new personal futures. You owe us, as disabled communities, a debt of gratitude as we present the country with this magnitude of change. Hence, welcoming us can and will not be simply for our own benefit, it will also be for the nation's benefit. And I want to believe that this informed the President in his decision to nominate the first disabled Deputy Minister.
Amongst the tasks the Minister has already outlined, is that I need to look at the issue of asset management - and we mean asset management in its totality, including facilities, etc. Where are we with this asset management and the registration of our assets, as the hon Moss has alluded to?
One of the challenges in addressing issues of asset management, especially because it is a co-mandate of Public Works, is the issue that we don't have a single custodian - a legislative gap. It is either owned by the Department of Public Works or the Department of Land Affairs. This makes it a little bit challenging for us to execute the mandate respectively. The unaccounted assets facility will put in place a programme to assist us in ensuring that the unaccounted assets of the state are returned to the state. We are going to facilitate and conclude a programme of a single ICT system so that we don't work with an asset register that belongs to one government, but yet there is a piece at the local government and a piece at provincial government. We must work with the same asset register, singing from the same hymnbook.
What have we done to address some of the challenges with regard to this country's asset register to date? We have established an asset register task team, which will be the task team that will be working with me to ensure that South Africa will have a state-of-the-art, meaningful asset register at the end of this term, one that will enable us to manage our assets and to even do preplanned maintenance so that we don't wait for the actual lift to break but know that the lift requires to be serviced.
Where would we like to go in the coming five years? We are obviously at the moment implementing the minimum Government-wide Immovable Asset Management Act, Giama, requirements. By 2012, we would like to be at the maximum Giama requirements. We would like to ensure, for example, that by March 2010 we will have concluded the verifications of the asset registers that are currently there, especially the immovable ones.
We would want to have consolidated and migrated to a single system, especially the information that we find in the Port Management Information System, PMIS, and the Works Control System, WCS. These are the ICT systems that we are currently using.
I am responsible for the vulnerable groups in the Department of Public Works. Let me try and outline what we are promising young people as we are celebrating youth month. We have the youth development agency that the President launched on 16 June. We are committing ourselves to ensuring that our youth programmes will speak to the issue of the youth service programme, and we will ensure that they complement the work that the youth agency will be doing.
As a department, we have a programme called the 2014 Youth Foundation and Skills Development, where we actually make it cool for young people to work in the industry of infrastructure. We want to say to the young people that this programme is intended to give them bursaries and to make sure the Infrastructure Development Programme rocks!
We have challenges with issues of disabled people. Our buildings are not accessible to respond to the needs. What are we going to do about this? We make the commitment that by 3 December 2009, which is the International Day for People with Disabilities, the Department of Public Works will celebrate the day by launching the disability policy. This will be a policy that will ensure that we meet the 2% employment rate as outlined in the Public Service Act and that we also ensure that there is provision of the required access to disabled people.
We will also develop a document that will be used as a criterion to determine how we are going to go about ensuring access. For example, we only have R15 million per year so we need to be guided by something that will tell us how to decide which schools will be made accessible or not. We will ensure that disabled people begin to benefit in the industry, not only as entrepreneurs but also as service providers.
We have a programme that we established for women. The department has supported the establishment of the SA Women in Construction. Our commitment is that in partnership with the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, we are going to begin to assist women, especially in rural communities. These women will begin to assist us with the much-needed early childhood development centres and the much-needed home-based care services the Minister alluded to so that they can become co-operatives. This means we won't have to parachute the elite from cities into communities, but instead begin to develop women under the same structure to provide the required training and the required infrastructure. In this way they will also be capacitated and empowered to be the managers of the infrastructure in their communities. We have established the Association for Women in Property and as we deliberate and conclude the issues around the property charter, as the Minister mentioned, we will ensure that that charter actually responds to the realities that women are facing. The Department of Public Works has children's programmes, and what is interesting is that the department has in fact never seen itself as providing programmes for children.
We are in the process, in partnership with the IDT, of eradicating the mud schools and creating a better environment for children in which to learn. We are fully committed to this programme. We need to ensure that Early Childhood Development, ECD, infrastructure is actually developed, as stated in the Children's Act, with a special focus on those who need it most in rural communities.
We will ensure that we have a safe environment where children can play and learn, and among those programmes we have implemented is that of building actual bridges. We are going to ensure that young people from Grade 10 are exposed to construction so that they can begin to choose construction as a career.
The issue of HIV and Aids remains a challenge in the construction industry. Working with our councils and partners, we are going to begin to take the issue of HIV and Aids very seriously. One of the reasons we need to up our stake in that area is because the industry itself relies a lot on scarce skills. Many of the people working in the industry are also people from outside South Africa.
The developing world is imposing travel bans in relation to HIV and Aids that are beginning to affect especially those migrant labourers who are coming into South Africa to work in our infrastructure to meet our scarce skills. What happens is that when they come to South Africa, they leave their countries and get a work permit here and when they go back to their respective countries where travel bans have been imposed, they get stuck at the airports, because they can't be welcomed back. This issue is that they are seen as bringing HIV into those respective countries. We need to respond to this and do something about it.
We will be working with the CBE and CIDB, so that we can start to develop wellness programmes and set guidelines regarding HIV and Aids in the construction industry, especially because that industry often deals with those who are not necessarily fully literate or have the necessary skills level. So we will ensure, as the Department of Public Works, that the HIV programmes are developed further.
I would like to extend my thanks to the President for awarding me the opportunity to be the first disabled member of the South African Cabinet; and the pressure is that I can be the gatekeeper and I can provide and represent the successes of disabled people. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the ANC for awarding me the opportunity, first and foremost, to be a Member of Parliament and, secondly, to be able to carry out their mandate over the next five years.
I would also like to thank the Minister, whom I will work with closely, for the support and for making me feel very welcome in responding to my special needs. I would like to thank the portfolio committee for their support and the work that we will be doing together, as well as the senior management in the department for having welcomed me and responded promptly to my special needs to ensure that my disability does not become a failing. I would like to thank my husband, who also happens to be my guide, for ensuring that I always make it on time to all my meetings and for all his support. To my family and my children I would like to say thank you. [Applause.] I thank my team in the office that will enable me to carry out the task given to me.
Let me conclude by leaving you with a message as we celebrate Youth Day. I would like to say to the young people in South Africa - because I am still a young person, I do meet the age requirement - especially those who are benefiting from us when we say, "The public works, because of Public Works", and I quote:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure ... We ask ourselves, "Who are we to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and famous?"
Actually, as young people - me included - we must ask ourselves:
Who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory ... that is within us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
I hereby present our Budget Vote and the programmes with the hope that the Assembly will ensure that we are held accountable and the portfolio committee will provide the oversight required to enable us to meet the requirements as outlined by the President of the Republic. I thank you. [Applause.]