Hon Chairperson, I would like to begin by thanking all the members who participated in this debate for their support and valuable inputs.
I will make sure that Comrade Madisha and I have tea together so that I can give him information and clarify some of the things that seem to be troubling him. I am sure that after my explanation he will be able to understand where we are going.
Hon Kubayi, the chairperson of the committee, stressed the importance of the massification of e-skills. I think this is going to be a very important programme for all our citizens. It does not refer only to high skills. It is only when people are able to utilise ICT facilities that we can increase the demand for them. It is for this aspect that, with our meagre budget, we will continue to try to get more resources, and at the same time collaborate with other educational institutions to massify e-skills.
Currently, we have a programme which includes four universities in this country. I think we will learn a lot from it, particularly because it is a distance e-learning programme, where people can acquire these skills without going to the institutions themselves.
It also opens opportunities for our youth to be involved in these e-sectors if they acquire the skills for their own development, as well as all other marginalised sectors of our society, including women and small enterprises, particularly rural enterprises. In other countries like India we have seen how their rural farming communities have just been transformed by the use of information and communications technologies.
In South Africa we have a huge informal sector, and these people are trading on a daily basis. Ikamva National e-skills Institute is involved in this sector to develop informal ICT applications, because applications can only work if they are developed to solve local problems. This is so that we can assist this sector to grow and be part of the formal sector of the economy.
With regard to the broadband roll-out in Cape Town, of course we welcome the roll-outs of the broadband plan which are being done by all the provinces. What is key here is that I think you should have been honest, like your Premier Zille, who thanked the State Information Technology Agency for actually running this programme and getting it operational. [Interjections.] We welcome the programme, but if we check it in terms of scale, it is really nothing compared to what the Gauteng government is doing. [Interjections.]