Speaker, hon President, hon Deputy President, honoured guests, and my predecessor, Tony Leon, much water has flowed under the proverbial bridge since this budget was conceived and allocated to your office, Mr President. During a recession the adage of cutting one's cloth according to what one can afford is the most prudent thing to do, as you yourself said.
In this case, however, you have done the opposite. To a certain extent, though, it is to be expected when a new President comes into office that he or she will have different priorities, strategies and implementation plans; but your plans are beyond your current budget.
Not only have you chosen an enormous Cabinet that appears to owe its existence to a not-too-unapparent appeasement strategy, but you have also created two surrogate departments within your own office. The planning and monitoring commissions are not headed by lightweight or junior Ministers. They will therefore develop an appetite for already scarce financial management resources in your office. The funding proposals and actual mandates of these two departments need to be very clearly explained and understood by all.
The cost of service delivery in this country is already excessively high due to the fact that cadre deployment and the expunging of the public service of the previous regime have left us with a corps of public officials that are not adequately skilled and equipped to perform their functions effectively. [Interjections.] This has led to us having to employ and fund, effectively, a dual public service which is made up of consultants.
These people are effectively the expunged former public servants corps that now advises government on how to do things. This is not very clever because, firstly, they don't come cheap, and they don't transfer skills because it is highly unlikely that consultants will consult themselves out of a job! [Interjections.] Secondly, they don't trust government because government put them out on the street.
My question today is: Who, actually, is governing South Africa? I know, hon President, that you are the president of the ANC and the President of this country; undisputed, but one must ask why it appears that the tail is wagging the dog. Why do new Cabinet Ministers and Deputy Ministers, affiliate union organisations, political parties and your own youth league seem to feel that they have the right to pull the purse strings and manipulate the agenda of your government?
The secretary-general of the ANC is not the director-general of the government, and unless there is a clear separation of powers between the ANC and your government, you will become a marionette controlled by those who believe that you are a dispensable tool.
Your one or two-term tenure debate is instructive in this regard. I caution, Mr President, that you not be fooled - because we are not fooled by people like Minister Shiceka, who say one thing and mean something else. He says, for example, "South Africa is one country with one leader, and no one is expected to be out of tune." Not only is this patently unconstitutional, but it smacks of double-speak and the worst kind of obfuscation.
This obfuscation was exposed for what it is by the Minister's acknowledgement this week that the ANC government intends to scrap provinces and that it is forging ahead with the Constitution Seventeenth Amendment Bill.
The DA unequivocally opposes both these measures that threaten to undermine our constitutional democracy and we will not allow the ANC to stop us governing in a province that we won in a free and fair election. [Applause.]
If you allow your party and its interests to trump the interests of the people, if corruption and incompetence are tolerated and overlooked, and if the Constitution is considered secondary to the political purposes of the ruling party, this will threaten our constitutional democracy. When one views the current basket of proposed legislation in its entirety, it is clear that there is a systematic assault on our constitutional democracy.
Allow me to raise some concerns about some of the proposed pieces of legislation; but my concerns are not limited to these examples. There is a series of Bills on the judiciary which, collectively, undermine its independence, increase the executive's ability to define its nature and impose the political agenda of the ANC upon this institution.
The proposed Seventeenth constitutional amendment bill that I referred to earlier, seeks to centralise power in the hands of the executive, which is now apparently held to account by Gwede Mantashe in Luthuli House and the monitoring commission under Collins Chabane - Minister Chabane.
The single Public Service legislation threatens the ability of municipal councils and provincial governments to determine and implement their own policies and practices when it comes to their employees; instead it centralises this power at the national level, thereby empowering the ANC government to force its own policies on these spheres of government.
The Bill proposing a national health insurance scheme, which will destroy what is actually working by bringing all health services to the lowest level instead of addressing the core problems in the health sector, will compromise access to proper health care even further for the poor. Then there is the Expropriation Bill, which seeks to empower the relevant Minister to intervene directly in land reform by doing away with the constitutional pillar of willing buyer, willing seller.
In most fields of government, the ANC seems hell-bent on diminishing the independence of civil society and those institutions designed to support the state. In education, the state now seeks to deploy teachers as it does doctors, nurses and the police. Then you wonder why there is an outflow of people from these critical posts!
The National Health Amendment Bill proposes that the Minister may determine where a doctor may practise and how much he may charge. The Built Environment Amendment Bill will prevent the engineering industry from being self-regulating. [Interjections.] They are coming, because where there is smoke there is fire. Even when you deny that they are coming, they're coming, Minister Manuel.
Elsewhere, independent boards such as nursing councils and school-governing bodies are having their right to decide on their own course of action curtailed or even stopped. And, incidentally, as to the question, Minister Manuel, about where these Bills are: Let me tell you, every single time we hear of a Bill that is coming -"iyafika". [It arrives.]
As this power becomes more and more centralised with an ever-growing administration, the Cabinet grows and expands its bureaucracy with the following consequences. Firstly, the lives of ordinary South Africans become increasingly dependent upon and influenced by the state. Secondly, the ability of state entities to provide proper services declines due to a bloated bureaucracy, and these are renowned for being inefficient. The collapse of the SABC is a classic case in point.
These two consequences will ultimately result in a passive citizenry that becomes more and more frustrated by poor service delivery. This is a recipe for unrest that we cannot afford in South Africa.
Mr President, you must rein in the ANC's tripartite alliance partners' insatiable desire for centralised control. This is not a "gogga maak vir baba bang" [frightening] story or "rooi gevaar" ["red peril"] story. It is a fact, if you look at all the pieces of this impending and existing legislation.
This is essentially why we have a Parliament, so that the representatives of the people can convene to consider all legislation proposed by government, so that we can provide oversight of the executive and hold the government to account. That is our responsibility. No one voted on 22 April 2009 to have a one-party state that controls all aspects of civil society with a rigor mortis hand that controls everything in a deathly grip.
Mr President, our nation and its people need to be led and governed with respect. Their independence is sacred, and our Constitution sacrosanct. Your early undertaking to uphold the Constitution, respect our Parliament and treat the opposition with due consideration is not compatible with these issues that I have raised today.
What is clear from these issues, though, is that President Zuma's administration is being dictated to by the ghost of President Thabo Mbeki's administration. Firstly, this is evident in your recent reappointments of some underperforming Cabinet Ministers, as well as the appointments of two failed former Cabinet Ministers as your advisers.
Secondly, it is evident in the pieces of legislation that I have mentioned today. And it is clear that this legislative agenda and its budget before Parliament do not yet belong to the ANC of President Jacob Zuma.
Mr President, it is imperative that you distance yourself from the failures of your predecessor. You must become unambiguous about how you intend to govern and lead this country out of the morass of that era and out of the trough of recession.
Mr President, the euphoria of an electoral victory has vanished like the morning mist. Your government must address the issues that affect our citizens on a daily basis. You must put the citizens first now. And, once again, Mr President, can I recognise your undertaking and commitment to working with the opposition? Nathi sithi phezu komkhono. Enkosi. [We also say that is unattainable. Thank you.] [Applause.]