Hon Chairperson, hon Minister and Deputy Minister, hon members, MECs for sport, may I first welcome the energy and vibrancy that the national Minister has brought to this portfolio. The role of sports in our communities is vital in building social cohesion and bringing our nation closer together.
I am happy to see, Minister, that you are well and fit again after the recent incident, and may God bless you as you recover because we need you in sport. Under your guidance the national department's renewed focus on youth development will hopefully build talent and ensure that today's youth become tomorrow's superstars, without any need for quotas. Under the right system of development and talent identification, today's youth will be able to shine on their own merits.
I want to welcome all sportspeople present today in the gallery, especially Valentina da Rocha, Hilton Langenhoven and Vanessa Lingeveldt. I also welcome the three PSL teams, namely Vasco Da Gama, Santos and Ajax Cape Town. I also welcome the principal of the Western Cape Sport School, who is present today in this House.
Minister, your drive to promote Magnificent Friday has already received support from all the MECs at the Minmec and it encourages all South Africans to get behind our cricket, rugby and netball teams, as is fitting for a nation of sport lovers who showed their passion in 2010 when we turned our country green and gold for Bafana Bafana every Friday.
On this note, may I congratulate the SA netball team on winning the test match against Trinidad and Tobago a few weeks ago at the Western Cape Sport School. I look forward to the success of our national netball team at the World Championships in Singapore this July. The Springboks, our national rugby team, will surely benefit from a nation's pride put on display with such vigour.
School sport, which you mentioned several times during your budget speech, has become one of the primary focuses of my department here in the Western Cape. Over the last year we introduced more than 100 mass opportunity for development, MOD, centres in our province's most vulnerable school communities. This is to ensure that schools without proper financial assistance experience the efficient running of a healthy sports programme.
The mass opportunity for development centres serve three purposes. Firstly, they provide a platform whereby children can engage in sporting facilities and activities and live a healthy lifestyle. Secondly, they offer our learners talent-identification opportunities, which will see them take advantage of the opportunities offered to them by our Western Cape Sport School and the various federations and leagues. Thirdly, and very importantly, these mass opportunity for development sport centres at our public schools contribute towards preventing antisocial behaviour in our communities.
We know that between 14:00 and 18:00 most children leave school and are unsupervised at home, while their parents are at work, earning a living in order to put food on the dinner table. These children's idle hands get them involved in mischief. By being active after school we are effectively preventing a culture of antisocial behaviour from setting in.
We have strategically placed many of our MOD centres in areas identified as high-risk areas for gangsterism and drugs. With a choice of 21 sporting codes, divided between winter and summer programmes, there is something for everyone. Lastly, and again very importantly, part of this programme is that our children must have fun.
In your budget speech, hon Minister, you called for immediate action on reviving school sport, particularly in rural and urban areas as well as in townships. I have recently visited Langa, Lavender Hill, Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, where I witnessed our MOD centres in action, as well as the activities of sports organisations such as Sporting Chance, with their street cricket and street soccer programmes. They share the same beliefs we do, namely that sport development is fundamental for the healthy growth of our learners and that a child in sport is a child out of court. Many hands make light work, and working with these organisations lightens the burden on this government.
We have already seen numerous successes from these MOD centres and I would like to invite you, hon Minister, to the next opening of one of these MOD centres. There is a much-needed impetus to open more of these centres in our rural areas, and I will soon be opening one in the southern Cape with my colleague, the Minister of Agriculture, Minister Gerrit Van Rensburg.
The Western Cape Sport School is also a fundamental part of our sport development programme and they have also had a wealth of successes against other Western Cape schools and sporting leagues.
In your budget speech, hon Minister, you mentioned that our country is still witnessing a sporting environment where there is a skewed picture of sporting facilities. My department has recently developed an interactive CD where one can view all the sporting facilities in the Western Cape via satellite imagery. Anybody complaining about such facilities can now sit in their office and view online the status of these facilities. I would like to hand over a copy of this CD to you. It was developed between my department and the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research and it belongs to all the people of South Africa.
I welcome the national Minister's commitment to engage the national Department of Human Settlements and of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs to redirect the municipal infrastructure grant funding to the national Department of Sport and Recreation for the roll-out of facilities in our schools and communities. To me this is a major breakthrough, because I have personally studied many of the annual reports of some municipalities and seen that many of these municipalities had budgeted for sports facilities. But when I looked at how much money they actually have spent on sports facilities, it was quite shocking.
I have noted your determination to improve governance in South African boxing. I want to ask the Minister to support our campaign to support the world boxing champion, Mr Mzonke Fana, in defending his title at home.
To ensure that funds are efficiently spent by our federations my department recently visited these federations so that we could personally hand over cheques to the different federations waiting for funding. Hon Minister, it is already May, as we speak here. It is important that these federations receive the money at the beginning of the financial year, so that we promote good governance, as one of the building blocks of good governance is predictability. I would like to encourage the national Minister to ensure that sports federations around the country receive their budget allocations early in the year so that they can make appropriate plans and get started on their programmes sooner rather than later.
I am looking forward to working with you, Minister, towards a nation where one's race is not a factor that determines a place in our national teams and one's skills and ability are the only measures of success. We have reached a point in our history where players across all sporting codes have proved that race no longer needs to be a deciding factor. They have the skills, experience, will, ability and guts to win. Let us now equip the next generation with these abilities so that we can enjoy their success just as we are currently enjoying the successes of our national teams.
My thanks goes to all the sportsmen and sportswomen, all the sports administrators, coaches, referees and sports managers for their support in building social cohesion - also to all the sportspeople in the gallery here today. Hon member Bloem, I noted your support of your team, but Ajax Cape Town will be back next year. [Laughter.]
Chairperson, hon Minister, Deputy Minister and chairperson of the portfolio committee, on a much more serious note, I am in agreement with you that the sudden passing away of the former director-general of your department is a great loss to your department and also to South Africa. I want to thank his family for his time and commitment to serving the sporting community but also for his career in the South African civil service. [Time expired.]