Thank you, Deputy Speaker. Minister, Cope agrees with the principles and objectives of strengthening further education through vocational training, aligning school education with higher education, and building capacity. This is because what we see today is that we have weak Further Education and Training institutions. The elements and the objectives of this Bill attempt to strengthen them. The Green Paper, in particular, elaborates further on the 2030 Vision, in which we want to build a vocational institute that will be able to build that capacity.
However, the danger that we in South Africa are confronted with is that we are redirecting students to Further Education and Training, but those very same students are not employable! Your intentions are very noble, but, Minister, the problem we are confronted with in this country is the centralisation of authority. We must avoid that. We, as Cope, are concerned that you continuously want to take over control of the running of universities. That was in the first Bill and now it is in this one.
We do not understand what informs that. We have seen your actions in your term of office. It is like giving a child a machine gun to just shoot everybody and kill universities. We fear that if we give you more power to run these universities, as you intend in your interventions as the Minister, you won't be capable of running and giving advice and capacity to these institutions. What you will do is to put in administrators who will fail, like those at the Walter Sisulu University for Science and Technology, WSU. You will also do what you were trying to do at the Central University of Technology, CUT, where you were dismissed.
What you know most, and what we even said on Tuesday, is that you will use the authority in this Bill that you are introducing to intervene at the universities and institutions where you seek to intervene, while all these universities are in fact collapsing under your own administrators! You are unable to intervene and help them.
We believe that this will compromise the academic freedom of the institutions, and in particular as it relates to the establishment of this institute. In the powers you want to give yourself you even say in some sentences that if the institute does not follow the instructions and the guidance, you will just disband the board! We do not want that. We need institutions that are properly guided, and institutes that will be able to guide. I therefore agree with the Professor. The Professor has put it like a professor, very nicely, and mentioned the intentions and how we want to see things.
Let me share with you a few stories. In a meeting that hon ... [Time expired.]