Cape Town - President Jacob Zuma will today respond
to a two-day debate by Members of Parliament on the State of the Nation Address
(SONA) he delivered to South Africans earlier this week.
The last day of the debate in
the National Assembly continued until late on Thursday evening, with MPs using
their allocated time to scrutinise and debate several topical issues, some of
them arising from the SONA.
Guests and members of the
public sat in the gallery to listen to the second day of the heated debate,
which began on Wednesday. As seen during Wednesday’s session, yesterday was
also marked by robust debate, as is the nature of these sessions.
The Chairperson of National
Council of Provinces, Thandi Modise, who presided over the first session of the
debate,
was continuously called upon to rule on objections to several
contentious statements made by some MPs.
Throughout, President Jacob
Zuma, who sat next to Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, listened attentively as
each speaker took to the podium. While the occasion was meant to be a
platform to debate the SONA, parties could not resist taking a swipe at each
other, something which has come to be accepted during these debates.
“It’s the nature of parliaments.
You go all over the world, parliaments are like this. It’s better here. In some
countries, MPs even resort to physical fights,” observed one international
journalist, who recorded the debate from the media gallery of the National
Assembly.
Investing
in the youth through education
As things got heated up, it was
Higher Education Deputy Minister Mduduzi Manana, who seemed to have succeeded
to calm the house down. Manana chose to steer away from politics and mud
slinging, and instead dedicated his address to speak about education and lauded
progress that has been made in higher education since 2009. There was relative
calm and less hackling throughout the 25 minutes of his address.
“The National Development
Plan requires that by
2030, at least 30 000 qualified artisans are produced per year. Our
department is on a mission to champion artisanship as a career choice.
“We are building two new
universities in post-apartheid South Africa that will change the lives of the
people of the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga,” Deputy Minister Manana said.
2014 had been declared as a
year of artisans, he said.
President Zuma stated in his
address to the nation on Tuesday that the number of young people in
universities and colleges has increased over the years, adding that contractors
will move on site in September to build the new universities in the Northern
Cape and Mpumalanga.
By January next year, the first
intake of medical students will be enrolled at the new medical university in
Limpopo. In addition, 12 training and vocational education colleges will
be built to expand the technical skills mix in the country.
On Thursday, Manana said the
Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape and the University of Mpumalanga
represented a milestone in the transformation and expansion of higher education
in South Africa.
“These were the only provinces
without universities. The infrastructure for these two universities will be
able to accommodate an increase in the number of students over the coming
years.”
The National Student Financial
Aid Scheme was increasing its support to poor students and assisted more than
one million students since 1991.
To address the issue of skills
shortage, Deputy Minister Manana said the Department of Higher Education will
build a number of skills centres in communities where people will be trained on
various skills to meet local economic needs.
“We will also prioritize the
areas of career guidance and dissemination of information to curb the skills
mismatch that we find in the country,” he said.
Deputy Minister of Communications Stella
Ndabeni-Abrahams used her debate slot to call on young people to celebrate the
gains that the country has made since 1994. She said the youth of 1976 remained
the “heroes”, who laid the foundations for today’s generation.
“Today as we engage in the
struggle to defeat unemployment, poverty and inequality, we count young people
among the main contributors and those who stand to gain the most from this
struggle,” she said.
South Africa was faced with
difficult challenges and young people needed to come up with solutions to those
problems. There was a need to enhance the capacity of the state for South
Africa to meet its development needs.
Deputy Minister
Ndabeni-Abrahams said work to professionalize the public service was continuing
with the recent introduction of the School of Government set to improve the
capacity of public servants.
“These interventions will
assist us to forge a disciplined, people-centred, efficient and professional
public service. They will help us to infuse within our public service the Batho
Pele (people first) principles,” she said.
SOURCE– SAnews.gov.za
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