Chair, the fact that South Africa is in an economic crisis is a foregone conclusion. The President himself has raised this. It is a further foregone conclusion that the crisis permeating our country is a consequence of, inter alia, massive unemployment, migration, forced labour, absence of skills amongst the majority and the incapacity of officials to administer resources. The Minister himself notes this in his input.
What we need to do is to emerge with a plan that will help us address these momentous challenges we face. We must ask that given that South Africa is faced with more than 4 million unemployed people today - a figure that is likely to triple during the life of this Parliament - what is it that we need to see achieved to address these momentous challenges? Once we have identified our strategic objectives, then we should work backwards to make available proper material and human resources in the quest to achieve those strategic objectives.
The weaknesses in this proposed budget are that it merely says we want to create 500 000 jobs. This is unscientific and will lead the country into a further, very long economic crisis. The proposed strategy - and this is evident in the proposed budget - indicates that the jobs you intend producing will enjoy the absence of permanence and quality. They will instead last an average of three months mainly during construction, as is presently the case.
Although we welcome the recognition that casual labour and labour brokers are a problem that needs urgent attention, we are concerned about the migration of factories from one province to the other in search of cheap black labour. Through its budget, government must make available resources, both human and material, to ensure the protection of such factories.
This intervention must include government's review of the existing legislation that deals with corporate insolvency for purposes of strengthening companies in distress and protecting jobs, including through the stabilisation fund.
The budget must also include the destruction of illegal forms of labour such as happens in the mines. There must be a budget included for a women's development fund, which will assist women to engage in economic productivity.
Both the President and the budget proposed today pledge to make available more resources to the CCMA in order to protect jobs. But the CCMA does not have the capacity needed to stick to all identified targets. It fails to hasten the awarding of arbitration awards and hasn't contributed enough to save workers from exploitation by labour courts. Without attention given to these problems, we do not envisage any success to save workers.
Your proposed budget must ensure that our people are skilled enough for them to survive. For example, by simply removing Setas from where they are presently without capacitating them, they will never assist us. Capacitate them so as to ensure that they in turn can skill the people.
As it is at the moment, your proposed budget simply intends availing more resources to various labour institutions without any proper assessment of their work and without checking whether the resources they already possess are being spent properly. We give the example of the UIF, which has a surplus of R9,2 billion which should be going to those who have lost their jobs. But unfortunately, this is not happening at all.
We should ensure that the money goes to those people who no longer have limbs and who are facing momentous problems of all kinds in those factories on a daily basis. But the R9,2 million that has been lying there for very many years ... [Interjections.]