We brought in new human resources with very little or no experience and that is why we are sitting with the challenge at Eskom today.
Over and above that, in most SOEs, if not all I think, there is one common factor; and that common factor is fraud, corruption, maladministration and a lack of capacity. The question is, what exactly are we going to do about it?
Let me remind this House of those evergreen contracts, which continue to run as 30 to 40 year contracts, and that we did very little or nothing about.
Now, privatisation has a purpose and that purpose is to act in the interest of investors, not in the interest of the people that we serve. That is proven throughout the world.
Why can't we have a model where 51% is owned by the state and 49% by the private sector, so we are still in control as a country, in the interest of our people?
However, as the NFP we find that some of us are obsessed with this thing of privatisation and the question that arises is ... When somebody wants to buy shares or they want to buy a business or they want to take over an SOE, they can only do that because they know they are going to make profits. So the question is, why can't we make the same profits if it is an SOE? [Interjections.] The only thing we need to do is to make sure that we employ people with the capacity and with the integrity to be able to run these organisations, and we won't have this problem
ever again. So, I'm hoping that we learn from this and correct it. Thank you very much.