Chairperson, I would also like to thank all the hon members who participated in this debate for their mainly thoughtful contributions, albeit coming from different political perspectives as is to be expected.
I would also like to commend the Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry for the consensus report that they presented. I give the assurance that we will do our best to respond to all the requests which have been posed to us.
There has also been a discussion between us and the chairperson about the committee undertaking a visit to our campus in Tshwane. I respectfully want to suggest that this is perhaps quite urgent to enable the hon Kotsi to understand that The Enterprise Organisation, TEO, is mainly an administrative division that deals with incentives. The questions that she was posing to TEO are actually properly addressed elsewhere, including to the department as a whole.
Now I may have hit the ground running but I'm afraid I can't give her all the answers right now, although the information is there. Let me say that I think that the basic picture is that the interventions that have been made by the department in the past, I would argue, have been quite critical in developing some of the industrial capacity that we have. I would cite the motor industry development programme as an example. I would also say that small business interventions have had successes.
However, the picture is one that shows that we have clearly and significantly not done enough. That, I think, is the reality.
I also think that the question that was posed by hon Mr Coetzee who has now left, was actually taking us into a very important debate, although I think he came at it from the wrong perspective. I want to recommend to Mr Coetzee - maybe one of his colleagues could tell him - that he would do well to look at a book by Erik Reinert, who is a Norwegian economic historian, called How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. This book, through a very detailed analysis of economic history, shows us that there is not a single example of any country at any time in the world, going back to the Principality of Venice in the 16th century, that has broken out of an economic regime characterised by diminishing returns and set itself on a growth path characterised by increasing returns. Not a single example exists of anyone who has done that without establishing a purposeful partnership between government and economic actors to carve out a new growth trajectory. There is no such example.
What is more, those countries that support the kind of policies that he is now enunciating on certainly did not do so when they themselves were industrialising. The other side of the coin is that bigger powers have always sought to prevent competition from what we now call "the developing world". That has always been the reality. So I think that that is what we should try to take on board and that is the quest that we are on.
I think that our emphasis on social dialogue, partnership and self- discovery should give enough comfort to anybody who cares to look at it more carefully, that the developmental state which we seek to build in South Africa is not some authoritarian leviathan; it certainly is not.
I also think that hon Prof Turok was taking us into a very important debate. I want to share an article with him later on which, like Martin Wolf, was showing that, thus far, the trajectory of the world economy in this particular economic crisis has very closely tracked the record of the Great Depression.
One of the things that observers are arguing actually led the Great Depression into a great depression, was that countries actually withdrew stimulus packages prematurely and that that sent the recession into a depression. I think that this is something that we need to be very clear about.
So, the entire speech centres on us upping our game so that we can actually make the kinds of interventions in the economy that we need to make, not least in the light of the crisis.
I want to welcome the remarks of hon Marais, and we look forward to a useful engagement with him. I want to agree with a number of points hon Marais made, certainly that the path of being a Minister of Trade and Industry is not strewn with rose petals; that the vision and mission and all those nice policy things are not going to be where we want to be judged. Our test is going to be on what discernable impact we make in practice; that is what we are focused on. We are also aware that the IDC's role is no longer to support the capital-intensive industries that it supported in the past, but actually is to make its facilities available to support more labour-absorbing industries.
There are three broad policy issues I just want to briefly respond to. The first one is our BBBEE. I think I would agree with hon Mabaso that it is absolutely essential that we push this forward.
With regard to those that say that there is a difference between the objective of BBBEE and the reality of narrow-based BEE, I think it is important that you actually say when that was the case. I think that the interventions that have been made in the past, namely the development of the codes and the charters, have actually been to try to broaden. It came at a particular moment. So I think that that work is intended to do that.
Having said that, I think there are a number of things that need to be done. We need to align black economic empowerment and the preferential procurement Act. That is an important piece of work. We need to align that with efforts to promote local production.
Then we do need to confront the debate about whether our instruments are sufficient to achieve a broad base. Our approach has been to argue that one of the fundamental things that we need to put in place in order to lead debate and discussion on this is the advisory council on black economic empowerment. We have been interacting with the Presidency, which ultimately will make the call on that.
I agree very much with hon Mabaso about the importance of co-operatives. If there is fronting, we must deal with it and crack down on it. That is one of our objectives in BEE in general.
We have not made sufficient progress with regard to co-operatives. They have all the promise that hon Mr Mabaso indicated and it will be one of our priorities to move in that direction.
Finally, let me address the question of the lotteries very briefly. With the information we provided you with and in the answer to a question we did not attempt to spin it or try to hide it - that's not a reality that I believe is defensible. When I took office I became aware of some work that had been done by my predecessor to identify a number of the issues that we need to address to improve the performance in this regard. They include proposals about regulatory changes, changes in administrative practices and even changes in the Act itself if it comes to the need for legislation.
What I've done is I have circulated that and received written comments from key players within government and I now am merely looking to try and confirm diaries. We will have a round table and we will put out a number of regulatory changes for public comment and act on those immediately.
Simultaneously I should just draw members' attention to the fact that calls are out right now and close on 8 July for nominations for a new National Lotteries Board. We are certainly not happy with the situation and are looking to improve dramatically on that. Just to show how little the matters of the relationship with economic development are matters of turf, I should perhaps conclude by saying that I am very happy to hand over the responsibility for the Lottos to my colleague, if he would like them! Thank you very much.