House Chair,
The Department of Public Enterprises and the Minister of Public Enterprises was the shareholder representative for the government on the state-owned companies (SOC’s) in its portfolio.
We now understand the realignment of SOC’s and we congratulate the Minister in the Presidency on your appointment. These entities will now fall under the Presidency for the time being. This includes Transnet, SAA, Denel, SAFCOL and Alexkor. The question is, of course, for how long will they reside there until they are assigned to their line function departments. We look forward to seeing progress in that regard.
The ACDP also welcomes the reprieve that the country has had from load-shedding that severely impacted our households and businesses. We fully appreciate this and give credit where it is due for the 100 days plus of no load-shedding. So, we do commend Eskom and the Minister of Electricity in that regard.
Minister, obviously Transnet is a massive concern. Billions of Rands in potential exports could not be exported. We heard passionate pleas from other speakers about record high export volumes — I think it was 200 million tonnes a year. Sadly, due to mismanagement and an inability to protect railway lines from thieves, freight volumes have plummeted dramatically.
The Minerals Council estimates inefficiencies cost the country a staggering R150 billion in forfeited mineral exports. This could be even worse than load-shedding. So, we welcome the intervention of the National Logistics Crisis Committee and we look forward to an improvement in that regard.
The Minerals Council said with additional exports, you could create an additional 40,000 jobs. That is significant. So, we appreciate the working together of the Minerals Council and Transnet to solve those very significant bottlenecks. Whilst much has been done under the new management at Transnet, we believe far more can be done.
We also take note of the National State Enterprises Bill that will create the holding company for all SOCs. We look forward to engaging with the details of this very important Bill. Other speakers have referred to the clarity required on as to how this Bill interacts with other pieces of legislation, particularly the Companies Act, the PFMA Act and the existing SOE’s founding legislation. So, there’s a lot of work to be done in this regard, and we notice that there are a number of concerns that have been raised and trust they will be addressed.
We appreciate the fact that SOCs can contribute significantly to economic growth after having been hollowed out during the years of state capture. We look forward to the improved role that they can play in economic growth and job creation in our nation.
I thank you.
