Dieselfde vrae moet beantwoord word oor die 2013-14 toekenning van R3,5 miljard om 200 000 huishoudings te elektrifiseer. Wat is ingesluit as R17 500 spandeer word om een huishouding te elektrifiseer? (Translation of Afrikaans paragraph follows.)
[The same questions should be answered regarding the 2013-14 allocation of R3,5 billion to electrify 200 000 households. What is included when R17 500 is spent on electrifying one household?]
Chairperson, according to Census 2011, 85% of households use electricity for lighting. Yet, every year, the main reasons behind fires in informal settlements are the direct result, not of electricity, but of the use of paraffin and open fires for the cooking of food and the heating of dwellings. Every year lives, livelihoods and belongings are lost to runaway fires. These are communities that were promised a better life.
Just over the past weekend, there were six incidents of fires in informal settlements in this city alone. One man was reported dead, and many more families were displaced. Minister, is this not a contradiction? We cannot continue in this vein. We need people who are better qualified to lead and deliver on all our projects for our people.
Ons voel gelukkig en is dankbaar oor die windplaas in Prieska in die Noord- Kaap, waar beide die Minister en die uwe vandaan kom. Die mense van die Noord-Kaap hoop dat mense van alle partye in die Noord-Kaap by die werkskeppingsgeleentheid sal baat vind. (Translation of Afrikaans paragraph follows.)
[We feel happy and are grateful about the wind farm at Prieska in the Northern Cape, where both the Minister and yours truly hail from. The people of the Northern Cape are hoping that people from all parties in the Northern Cape will stand to benefit from this job creation opportunity.]
The department must provide its five-year plan for all the departments that fall under it, as well as the entities it supports, its goals and how and where the department sees the identified entities in five years.
In his state of the nation address, President Zuma promised the people that his administration would work smarter, faster and better to alleviate poverty. [Interjections.] In 2008, Eskom's lack of capacity led to load shedding, which had huge repercussions for the country's economy. The subsequent stoppages affected the mining sector and pushed gross domestic product growth below 4% in the same year. This was one of the reasons why there was very little job creation or growth. Again, in 2013, the country's gloomy economic growth and job creation will be hit by the rumoured load shedding. How will this alleviate or contribute to the status of job creation or poverty?
Minister, whilst the Department of Energy says it will promote energy efficiency and conservation through the expansion of the solar water heating programme, surely, we should be looking at solar energy as a whole and not confining ourselves to solar water geysers. Cope asks that for the creation of sustainable jobs, we should learn from the United States, where more people are employed as solar workers than as coal miners. Solar energy has contributed to huge job growth. In South Africa, coal has become the number one priority to produce 90% of electricity for domestic use. This is not good news. Doing anything more with coal would put the country on a collision course with its Copenhagen Accord climate change pledges. Minister, we should be looking more holistically at solar energy.
Furthermore, lack of capacity has also cost South Africa millions of rands and tens of thousands of jobs in the biofuels industry. Seven years after a government feasibility study showed that biofuels have the potential to create tens of thousands of new jobs, the paperwork needed to establish it remains outstanding. Incentives have proven not to be sufficient to lure investments to the biofuels sector. The department has doubled its spending on consultants to R61,2 million just for research on nuclear build. This happens against the backdrop of sending 60 employees to France for training, only to come back and be retrenched. Was this not deemed wasteful? It does not make economic sense to reduce spending on noncore goods and services and to misuse millions on consultants who have no structure to hand over the functions to after they have completed the research.
In 2011, the Minister announced that a nuclear tender proposal was submitted to Cabinet in September of that year. Are there problems facing the department in delaying the advertisement of the tender, or are there issues that we might not know of?
In conclusion, I would like to thank the chairperson of the portfolio committee for being consistent. [Time expired.]