Cape Town - The government has made inroads with regards to service delivery and has speeded up the delivery of social grants, processing of IDs, application of mining rights and prospecting licences, cleared a backlog of court cases and has put in place various measures to get departments to pay small businesses within 30 days, Zuma said today.
Responding to the debate on the State of the Nation Address in Parliament, Zuma said a hotline run by the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda) to tackle payments on behalf of small business had, as of 15 December, answered 25 000 calls and facilitated payments of over R270 million to small enterprises since it was set up in 2009.
All departments had now also been instructed to put in place systems to track invoices from service providers as they moved though the various stages of approval and officials were required to provide monthly reports to National Treasury on the number and value of invoices that had not been paid within 30 days, said Zuma.
He said there had been noticeable improvements in the performance of government agencies providing services to small businesses, adding that a new one-stop small business funding institution, following a merger of various agencies, would be launched in April.
"We want to get South Africa working," said Zuma, who added that his visits to provinces and municipalities to check on service delivery would continue, while the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation would continue monitoring the performance of departments.
The department started a programme to monitor service delivery in provinces and 120 facilities were visited last year.
The Department of Mineral Resources established a new on-line application system in April 2011, which has enabled the department to issue prospecting rights within three months and mining rights within six months as opposed to the periods of six and 12 months respectively.
Zuma said the Department of Home Affairs had reduced the processing time for IDs from 127 days in 2007 to less than 45 days in February last year. The department had cleared the backlog of 57 000 permit applications.
The Department of Social Development had reduced the number of days it took for applicants to receive social grants from 30 days to nine days. There was an initiative in place to upgrade 300 social grant distribution centres and to date, 221 centres had been completed.
With regards to the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, between 2009 and 2011, a total of 43 665 cases had been disposed of as a result of the introduction of additional regional and district criminal backlog courts.
The President said the infrastructure summit he announced in his Address last week to brief investors would be convened in April.
Zuma said his Presidential Infrastructure Commission would be meeting tomorrow and added that a new infrastructure development law would be drafted to simplify administrative requirements and promote cooperative governance across the three spheres of government, building on the soccer world cup experience.
He said the state had to play a central and strategic role in driving investment in under developed regions of the country, as the government's infrastructure programme would do and had done.
He said sub-Saharan Africa was expected to grow at 5.4% over the next five years and the creation of a Free Trade Area (FTA) across the continent meant that South African manufacturers and export industries stood to benefit.
South Africa had experienced a fourfold increase in exports and doubling of imports from Brics (Brazil, Russian, India and China) members to South Africa, he said.
Responding to remarks made by Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Pieter Mulder yesterday, Zuma said the land question was an emotive issue and must be handled with "utmost care".
He urged Mulder to "tread carefully" on the land issue and added that for the majority of people, it was a "matter of life and death".
A Green Paper on Land Reform and had been introduced last year. The three fundamentals for land reform include the de-racialisation of the rural economy, democratic land allocation and use across gender, race and class, and the strict production discipline for guaranteed food security.
"Another lesson learnt over the years is that the process of acquiring and distributing a particular piece of land is often lengthy, and this escalates the cost of redistribution because the former owner stops investing in the land. Many of the farms are therefore in a poor state of repair at the point of acquisition with very low productivity.
"This led to the adoption of a recapitalisation programme in November 2010 run by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. By December 2011, about 600 farms were in the process of being rehabilitated through this programme," Zuma said, adding that it was in the interests of all South Africans that the process be finalised speedily.
Zuma also thanked South Africans for participating in the State of the Nation Address through social media and other channels.
He said almost three million people watched his address on SABC2 and 1.3 million on e.tv - more than double the two million that watched the address in 2009 when it was held during the day time.
