Chairperson, the Department of Science and Technology is often misunderstood in terms of its importance in the overall formula for the development of this country. It does not carry the same political appeal as the housing, welfare and social development departments, yet it is the key to our economic development.
The world is moving and it's moving fast, dividing countries between those who are technologically clued up and those who will remain technologically clueless; between leaders and followers in the field of technology. All that lies between us and the possibility of becoming technological followers is the Department of Science and Technology and the valiant and relentless efforts of its very good Minister.
This department is terribly underfunded for the function that it needs to perform. In my humble but firm opinion, the department does not receive the major support from the public and from all of us as politicians and parliamentarians that we should be giving it. Our future hinges on being able to perform a technological leapfrog into a future that will be on par with the more developed countries, otherwise we will not be in a position to extract ourselves out of our dependence on commodities. In the world of tomorrow, commodities are going to be an ever-decreasing measure of added- value products.
There is a great deal of talk about building infrastructure. The President has committed himself to direct government spending towards the building of infrastructure. However, if we look at the types of infrastructure, very few are really capable of lifting the technological floor of this country.
We have made mistakes and some were even made by my former party brother and leader, the former Minister of Science and Technology, Ben Ngubane, who felt that arms procurement would raise the technological floor of South Africa because we got these enormously complex machines. The fact is that that did not happen. We need to invest in laboratories and research facilities, which become available to the industries that utilise them, rather than promoting the creation of those very industries.
There are fields awaiting leadership: biotechnology and nanotechnology. We need to have large-scale government investment in building a Silicon Valley for nanotechnology or for biotechnology in South Africa. What we have in biotechnology in South Africa is enormous and remarkable, considering our small population basis and our small skills basis. It just needs a real push from government to be taken to the next stage where we can compete with countries like Israel or Japan, who are also trying to not be dependent on natural resources and to find their future in the world through technology.
In our view, processes in this country are moving into too many different directions. This happens across all the fields of policy. We want to do the one thing but then we do the opposite, or we want to do two things that are at odds with each another. The Minister has correctly spoken about centres of excellence. Excellence is excellence, it is across the board and it is always a commitment that we either have or do not have; that we either share or do not share. It is not a commitment that we perform in this committee, which is particularly technologically advanced, conducting its discussions, as we heard today ... [Interjections.]