Nearly 10 years ago, the Department of Labour identified serious shortcomings in its information and communications technology infrastructure and capacity, and decided to take action to correct the situation. That was the right thing to do.
In December 2002, the department signed a public-private partnership, PPP, agreement with Siemens Business Services. The partnership would run for 10 years, ending in November 2012, at an initial cost of Rl,2 billion for its duration. As we speak, the cost is projected to have ballooned to R1,9 billion by the end of the contract.
The PPP was motivated on the understanding that certain goals were to be met. In March 2012 the department reported to the Portfolio Committee on Labour that after the project had been running for nearly 10 years, three of the five objectives had not been achieved and two had been partially achieved.
What does this mean in real terms? An analysis done by the department regarding the capacity built through the PPP reveals that while Siemens could count 197 "resources" - people - in various areas of IT activity to its credit, the Department of Labour could count only three people. That means the department could show only three people with IT expertise for the more than R1,5 billion already spent on the project. Poaching is being blamed for this.
I have charged that, such a disastrous outcome, the money already spent could be deemed fruitless and wasteful expenditure. The department's director-general disagrees. Hon members, you judge for yourselves. I draw the attention of Parliament to the situation during this budget debate because the saga is not over yet.
A company called Accenture has since been engaged to salvage the situation, at an additional cost of R2,7 million for Phase 1 and R8 million for Phase 2. This agreement runs concurrently with the winding-down process of the PPP agreement.
Chairperson, I recognise that the Minister and the director-general inherited this tragic situation and are doing what they can to correct it. My problem is that the PPP project failed because, among other factors, the department had "no internal capacity to manage the PPP and perform the required oversight".
I hope the situation has changed since the department reported in March. However, with only three people with IT expertise in the department, how can they make sure that the PPP winding-down process and the intervention by Accenture will yield the desired results?
Chairperson, this is not just an idle question. Just ask the director -general and the Compensation Fund commissioner how the lack of appropriate IT infrastructure frustrates their efforts at effective service delivery. The DG witnessed for himself how a computer at a labour centre in Bloemfontein bombed out three times in 30 minutes while the official was trying to upload a job seeker's application onto the system.
The Compensation Fund Commissioner knows that he has a huge backlog of applications to deal with, but he cannot quantify the backlog. He explained:
It is very difficult to determine because of the manual system we use to process claims. We still use brown files that are carried from one place to the other.
Clearly this means that files can get lost from time to time, frustrating not only the department's officials, but also, and even more so, the claimants, who have to wait for extended periods to have their cases resolved. Nearly 10 years later almost R2 billion has been spent since the PPP agreement was signed, an agreement to address exactly these sorts of problems, or should I call them challenges? This is unacceptable, and the DA is watching the situation very closely.
Chairperson, I would also like to draw the attention of the Minister to the fact that the DA was not happy, notwithstanding the claimed urgency of the situation, that the department invoked Treasury Regulation 16A6.4 to deviate from the competitive bidding processes to appoint Accenture. Deviation from laid-down procedures to acquire goods and services for the government is a risky practice and should be strenuously discouraged.
Chairperson, the Department of Labour points out on page 5 of its Strategic Plan for 2012-17 that the first challenge facing us is unemployment and underemployment. The DA agrees. By December 2011, the total number of jobless South Africans had reached 6,559 million. Disconcertingly, most of the millions of unemployed persons are under the age of 30 and over 66% have less than a Grade 12 education. Indeed, the country has an unemployment crisis.
I now ask, hon members, why it is, then, that the department refuses to back a youth wage subsidy, or to reform our labour market in order for it to be more labour-absorbing? [Applause.] Why does it propose constricting new regulations on businesses without even doing a proper regulatory impact assessment? I would have thought that it was the Department of Labour's job to increase the number of people in the labour force.
We all know of many of the millions of young South Africans who turn 18 this year, exactly 18 years after the end of apartheid, and who will not be able to find employment. Has the department, and indeed the government, done all it can to provide our first born-frees with opportunities for a better life? Hon members, I submit that that has not been the case.
Ke ka lebaka la eng Cosatu e gana etswa dimilione tsa ba?wa ba tlhoka ditiro? A fa Cosatu ga e na kutlwelobotlhoko mo ba?weng ba, le bamalapa a bo bona? (Translation of Setswana paragraph follows.)
[Why is Cosatu refusing to back a youth wage subsidy while millions of youth are unemployed? Is Cosatu empathising with the youth and their families?]
Why do we persist in promoting labour policies that clearly favour those already empowered, like the 2 million or so labour union members, at the expense of ... [Interjections.] ... the millions of unemployed and disillusioned South Africans?
Ka ntlha ya eng fa batlhokaditiro ba balwa ka dimilione mo nageng e, ke goreng batlhokabaemedi mo Nedlac gore dillo tsa bona di utlwale mo kgotleng eno? (Translation of Setswana paragraph follows.) [Why is it that millions of people in the country who are unemployed do not have representatives in Nedlac so that their problems can be heard in that council?]
However, the DA is heartened by the fact that the Department of Labour is proposing to amend relevant legislation to regulate rather than ban labour broking as demanded by the union federation, Cosatu. The government is right to take this position. Hon Minister, through you, Chairperson, you have the DA's support on this crucial matter.
In such an environment of high unemployment we must do all we can to create employment opportunities, rather than pander to those who would do the direct opposite. Destroying a whole industry, such as labour broking, which is estimated to provide hundreds of thousands of unemployed people with job opportunities, would be treason.
This brings me to the Department of Labour's Inspection and Enforcement Services Unit. The department has committed itself to making the inspectorate more professional by enhancing its capacity. However, they point out that the unit has "no inspection and enforcement case management system" and has a high vacancy rate, according to its own risk management assessment. The unit has yet to fill 84 of its 1 098 posts. This is an urgent matter because it is critical to the enforcement of our labour laws.
However, there is hope. Although straining under a heavy caseload, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration seems better poised than many of the sections in the department to deliver on its mandate - the Minister referred to this, so I won't bore you with the details. I hope that the other sections that are struggling to meet their service delivery targets will use the CCMA as a case study in regard to how to improve their own performance.
In a contrary situation, I do not believe that the National Economic Development and Labour Council, has covered itself in glory. It failed to reach consensus during the protracted deliberations on the proposed amendments to the Labour Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act. In times like these it is important that an organisation like Nedlac should be the cohesive material that keeps everyone together.
Chairperson, I have dwelt quite a bit on the question of the department and its IT infrastructure tribulations, because this cuts across the service delivery efforts of every one of the department's four programmes and eight subprogrammes. These will be adversely affected by the lack of adequate and appropriate IT expertise in-house and a dysfunctional IT infrastructure. The department cannot afford to slack here, as its effectiveness depends on its success in this regard.
In conclusion, Chairperson, there are some who say the DA is good at criticising the government and the ANC, without providing any solutions. Of course, we all know that this is not true. The DA always makes suggestions and offers solutions. The government has just become excellent at ignoring our suggestions. [Time expired.] [Applause.]