Madam Chair, Minister, chair of the portfolio committee, the ANC government recognises the importance of the relationship between key constraints, either presented to us by the apartheid legacy or as factors arising from developments in the global economy, on the one hand, and the need to drive a thorough transformational agenda, whose key tenets are a focus on the poor and modernising the South African economy in order to be competitive. This balanced approach to economic management has been, and continues to be, the cornerstone of the ANC's strategic programme. In our manifesto we have recognised the importance of this balance, especially given the current global economic downturn.
The acceleration of delivery of infrastructure and electricity, construction of major road infrastructure, ports and rail are deliberately enforced by government and the state-owned enterprises to modernise and grow this economy. These massive infrastructure programmes will also assist us to navigate the current recessional challenges. We are convinced that the scale of this infrastructure spend will ensure that the South African economy is put back on an equitable path.
State-owned enterprises have gone beyond the era of broad restructuring that government was pursuing in the first decade of freedom, and have moved to a phase of massive investment in order to raise capital formation to a level that can deal with unemployment, poverty and underdevelopment. A key challenge is co-ordination, in order also to broaden our skills base.
I may pause a moment, and reflect a bit on the role of state-owned enterprises in skills formation in the past. If you take the figures of 1975, we had about 33 000 registered apprentices, largely white artisans. If you take the same figure in 2000, we had 10% of that, 3000 of all races. If you pose the question, who was providing that training in 1975, it was Iscor before privatisation, Eskom before commercialisation, and Transnet. When privatisation of Iscor and Sasol took place, and Transnet became corporatised, the focus was on the bottom line. What was then the victim, was training. An important aspect of this build programme now is to make sure that we can fast-track training of major skills that our economy needs - engineers, technicians. We were just talking to the Transnet people before coming here. They have about 86 centres that are training people, with more than 4 000 apprentices going through there, and Eskom has a similar number of 5 000. That in itself is beginning to play a developmental role in these institutions. A second element of this thing: When we spend and invest in this infrastructure, if I may borrow from Keynes, it will be to prime the economy and create demand in our earning power. The question is: How do you make sure that, in that demand, we avoid as much leakage as we can - I would agree with hon Greyling - so that we make sure there is more local content in this regard? Both Eskom and Transnet have done detailed work on what we call the competitive supply developing programme, whose main focus is to ensure that we can achieve as much local content as possible in those programmes.
The last issue which I think I need to deal with is this issue of the poor in relation to electricity. I think part of the dialogue we need to be having is to ensure that most of our poor people understand the rights they have. For instance, as politicians, to what extent are we assisting them to ensure that they understand their free basic electricity? Secondly, when Eskom is granted the tariff by Nersa, they normally give a discriminated price for the poor people and for all of us.
So those are some of the issues, but we are engaging with everybody, including the labour movement, and all other stakeholders in regard to this debate.
We are trying to navigate this thing and make these changes, but in an environment which is not of our choosing. If I may - people who may be in the Communist Party will be happy that I quote Marx in this room - Marx once said: "We are making history in conditions not of our choosing." And I think that is the route we are beginning to navigate with these state-owned enterprises. I thank you. [Applause.]