PRETORIA— South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa teed off at the Presidential Golf Challenge (PGC) in a bid to drum up financial and technical support for the Adopt-A-School Foundation.
Addressing the media ahead of the tee off, Ramaphosa explained that traditionally, the PGC is held every year following the State of the Nation Address (SONA).
“Every President nominates the charity or the entity that should benefit from the proceeds of… an event like this. We are truly grateful to have sponsors who have been supporting the work that we do and in our case, it is the Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation that is a beneficiary.
“[The foundation] works with schools through the Adopt-A-School Foundation and adopts almost 600 schools in the country and enables those schools to function properly. Education must be delivered in a way that it produces well educated young people,” he said.
Talking about his chances on the golf course, the President did not rate his skills very highly.
“My golfing skills are atrocious. They have really declined. I haven’t played golf in more than a year so I don’t really regard myself as a golfer. Now I just putt around,” he said.
Answering questions from the media, Ramaphosa assured the public that the State of Disaster he announced during the SONA will not be subjected to any looting of state coffers.
“There’s not going to be any looting. There’s just going to be a process of ensuring that we deal with the crisis and we will be following all the processes, the rules and the regulations to speed up the process of enabling Eskom to be able to deal with the challenges of generation and transmission.
“That’s what the State of Disaster is going to be addressing so if there is any money that is going to be deployed, it’s money that is going to be deployed to Eskom – to entities that are going to enable us to deal with the energy crisis. There’s no form of money that’s going to be parcelled out to individuals,” he said.
He further emphasised that although he cannot give a firm date on when load shedding will end, the State of Disaster provides the tools to bring the country closer to that time in a shorter space of time.
“The State of Disaster is going to give us the instruments, the capabilities of dealing with this energy crisis and that is what the state of disaster is meant to do – including appointing a Minister of Electricity who’s going to be focussed … on ensuring that we deal with load shedding and restore the capability of Eskom working with the board and the management on an on hand basis.
“[The minister] will be in my office because in the end, it is a responsibility that the people of South Africa have imposed on me so I must pave the way with all the capability to deal with it. Whatever criticism that may be, it is criticism that is misguided because what we should be focussing on is load shedding and dealing with it,” President Ramaphosa said.
Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK