Deputy Speaker, we would like to welcome the newly-appointed National Commissioner for Correctional Services. We hope that his appointment and that of the new Chief Financial Officer will improve the situation in the department.
We say this because all is not well in the department. The department has had six successive qualified audits, and the national commissioner is the third incumbent in this post in the last two years. As a result of that there has been a massive leadership vacuum.
Partly because of this, this budget is not aligned with the aims and objectives of the White Paper on Corrections, five years after that White Paper's adoption by the ANC government.
The department is plagued by instances of corruption that lead to prisoners escaping, as recently occurred in Durban Westville, and to the unhealthy influence of prison gangs.
Every oversight visit to prisons we undertake exposes managers who cannot manage, staff vacancies that are not filled, maintenance work that is incomplete, expensive security equipment that is not working and inmates who are not productive.
Five years ago government promised eight new prisons. Only one has been built in Kimberly, but it was delivered 18 months late and commissioned without telephones or IT equipment. The construction of the other prisons awaits the advice of transactional advisers, at the same time serious overcrowding is a feature of two-thirds of the prisons in South African
Under these circumstances, we cannot support the Budget Vote. [Applause.]