Firstly, I had things to resolve in this country, for our country to go forward. The fact that interns, doctors who were working for the first time in their lives, were underpaid: I acceded to it even before the march. I am a doctor myself, I know. I said, I want to encourage the children of this country to do medicine when they pass matric. So the first thing I did was to check the offer on the table with regard to the salaries of interns, which put them at the level of assistant- director in government. That was the document I put to them, not this one. I want to encourage children to study medicine.
My second area of focus was people who are called registrars. These are people who have gone back to study, to become specialists, to specialise in gynaecology, surgery, anaesthetics, etc. In our country, when you do medicine, as a medical officer, having finished your internship and community service, when you go back to study, you take a salary cut. This was a disincentive. That is why many of the people who are doing senior degrees in our medical institutions are not South Africans. I want South Africans to go back, so I placed emphasis on registrars. I am giving you the principles.
Thirdly, I don't want academics to leave our academic institutions and go elsewhere, especially professors. In this document, from tomorrow, if it is signed, any person who becomes a professor will end at the level of director-general or higher. [Applause.] That is what I presented. That is what I have here. In fact, people who have been professors for a long time are now earning more than Deputy Ministers in cabinet. This is the document I have presented. [Applause.] This is what I have presented to the unions.
I am challenging you, when this document becomes public, after the unions have signed, to check area by area, and compare. In terms of this document, it is better to remain a doctor in a hospital than to become a manager in government, in terms of this new document I have presented - not this one, which nearly burnt my country. [Applause.] I am not sure whether Mr Waters is also using the same group of consultants, but they made an honest mistake. That is why I don't want to name them.
How do you inject more than R1 billion into the salaries of so few people? Doctors are very few.