Today, accompanied by my colleagues, DA Shadow Minister of Trade and Industry, Dean Macpherson MP and Tshwane MMC for Economic Development and Spatial Planning, Cllr Randall Williams, we met with executives of the Centurion Aerospace Village (CAV) and officials from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).
The meeting revealed that, despite R133 million that has been spent on the entity since its formation 12 years ago by the DTI, CAV is still in concept phase and has not made any meaningful contribution to South Africa’s aeronautical industry and associated job creation in the sector.
The DA will write to the Minister of Trade and Industry to request that he intervenes to ensure the CAV starts fulfilling its mandate of creating jobs and makes meaningful progress in the next 6 months. Should this intervention fail, the Minister must then consider redirecting the entity’s budget towards supporting small business players in the aeronautical and defence industry who are already struggling to compete with established players in local and international defence markets.
The R1,3 billion projected spend by CAV should only be made available by DTI when the Minister is satisfied that adequate corporate governance measures have been put in place to prevent pilferage.
CAV was launched in 2006 by DTI to create thousands highly skilled niche jobs by capacitating local aerospace and defense companies to be suppliers of choice to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as Boeing, Airbus, Spirit Aviation and Labinal.
The reality, however, is that none of these jobs have been created and the entity’s executive management are nothing but ‘glorified housekeepers’ who have spent millions of taxpayers money on a project that has brought no tangible benefits to the job creation focus on which it was conceived.
Notwithstanding clear evidence that CAV has become a DTI vanity project, the DA delegation was told that only one senior official was dismissed from the company after allegations of fraud, corruption and reckless tender appointments surfaced in 2015.
It is vital that consequence management in the organisation be improved to prevent further abuse of resources by unscrupulous and corrupt officials.
While CAV has managed to secure a few tenants, time is running out for CAV the longer it takes government to release funding needed to help the entity fulfill its core mandate. The ANC’s government’s bureaucratic mess is putting a spanner into CAV’s attempts to capacitate South Africa’s defence and aeronautical sector.
Continued spending on a vanity project such as CAV by the ANC government while South Africans are going through one of the worst cycles of rising food and fuel prices, is not only reprehensible but speaks volumes about a government that has lost touch with the struggles of the poor and which continues to pay lip service to job creation with no tangible results.