Chairperson, firstly, let me take this opportunity to thank my right-hand support, the Deputy Minister, whose agility, robustness and forthrightness are my strength. [Applause.] I want to thank the private office staff for their tolerance in sometimes working under difficult situations. I want to thank the entire Ministry and senior leaders of our institutions. I want to thank my family for accepting my scarcity, as I spend more time with government and the department. [Applause.]
I want to thank all the speakers here today. And I want to indicate to all of them, starting from the chairperson of the committee, that we remain committed to subjecting ourselves to your oversight and leadership. We will respond to all the issues that you raised. No one raised an issue that we can ignore. We will follow up on all the issues raised. That's a commitment.
We thank the chairperson of the committee, and as we march on the journey of strengthening the State Information Technology Agency, we will definitely talk to the second phase as he called on us to do. As we do that, what can be expected is that we are going to talk about the triangle of ICT in government. As we do that, we will be talking about Sita, we will be talking about the Government Information Technology Officers - Gito - Council, and we will be talking about the office of the government chief information officer within the Department for the Public Service and Administration.
The success of Sita is also defined in terms of the co-operation they receive from the Gito Council and from the office of the government chief information officer. As we unveil and talk to you in terms of the second phase, as the committee, we will then give an account in terms of what we are doing to strengthen Sita. This is because we want to realise what we set ourselves to achieve in 1999 when we established Sita, namely that we would perfect and strengthen our governance through information technology.
We appreciate the issues raised by the MEC. The NCOP is a very interesting House of Parliament, where one even finds MECs coming and sharply raising issues in their capacity as members of legislatures. It's a very interesting arrangement. Hon MEC, the issues you raised were noted. In fact, you talked about issues that have been identified and have begun to receive priority attention in the province of the Eastern Cape.
On 4 May, we were in the Eastern Cape and had a meeting with the executive council led by the premier. At that meeting, we agreed to establish a team that is going to deal with the strengthening of Sita in the province. That team, hon MEC, will deal with the issues that you were raising.
We have been in the Eastern Cape because when we dealt with the question of the African Peer Review Mechanism when writing our second report, we identified blockages to service delivery as one of the crosscutting issues that we had to account for. We also had to deal with that as a mirror reflecting our performance. We chose the Eastern Cape specifically to deal with those issues. We thank you for raising those issues.
I have just had a conference here with my right-hand support - a very serious conference - wherein we debated and resolved that when we roll out the "My Public Servant, My Future" project in the provinces, we will start in the province of the Eastern Cape. [Applause.]
When we debated this budget in the National Assembly on the question of local government, which is at the coalface of service delivery, we resolved that, as we gave priority attention to providing support at the local government level, to unveil a plan in no time, led by the Deputy Minister, in terms of how we were going to make sure that there was professionalism in the local sphere. When we combine that with the project of "My Public Servant, My Future", we are saying that in any situation in which there are service-delivery-related demonstrations, they will not be due to the contribution of public servants. It will be due to other things, such as resource constraints, which we will then be in a position to address.
Having said this, I want to say thanks and, once more, commit ourselves to following up on all the speeches that members delivered here to make sure that we attend to the issues raised. When we say that the Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy is going to play an active role as a preparatory school, we mean it. At the moment, what happens is that Palama comes into the picture to deal with induction and further training. But sometimes you find that the induction and further training may not address some of the key issues that were supposed to have been addressed right at entry level. That is why we say that we need to use Palama as that preparatory school.
Having said this, we say to the select committee of the NCOP that as we deal with these issues it is possible in terms of real separation of powers to work together - that your oversight for us is not an irritation. Be assured of that. Your oversight is assistance; your oversight is partnership; your oversight is teamwork. We welcome it. Thank you very much. [Applause.]
Debate concluded.