MBOMBELA – Social media made it into the budget speech for the 2015/16 financial year beginning in April. Finance MEC Mr Eric Kholwane quoted a Facebook post from a resident in his speech which was delivered in legislature on Tuesday.
“Without clean water there can be no healthy communities. This is a vision that premier has declared three years ago (sic).” A total of R200 million has thus been allocated to the Department of Human Settlements specifically for internal water-reticulation initiatives in the province’s municipalities.
Mpumalanga’s total allocation, from equitable share, conditional grants and projected revenue decreased from the funds for 2014/15. Kholwane noted 73 per cent of this had been allocated to social services – health, education and social development.
“The needs of the citizens are unlimited, while the resources at our disposal are limited,” Kholwane said.
He added that the fiscal environment was tight and demanded efficiency in the utilisation of resources as well as the slowing down of spending on non-critical activities.
To make ends meet a moratorium had been placed on funded and unfunded vacancies in all departments – with the exception of the provincial legislature, school-based positions in the Department of Education and specific identified categories in the Department of Health, including 1 571 critical vacancies.
Kholwane explained that as of April 1 the provincial municipal-support function would move from the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) to the provincial treasury. Cogta had, however, been allocated R152,9 million to “strengthen the administrative, oversight capacity and accountability of municipalities”.
Kholwane said monitoring needs improvement, money alone would not solve a municipality’s problems. Why this had not yet happened with the administration of Thaba Chweu Municipality, he said there were overlaps of responsibility as there had not been a clear line between Cogta and treasury.
He continued along the lines of planning, speaking about the parastatals under his economic development department such as the Mpumalanga Economic Growth Agency (MEGA) and the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency. These would take a long time to become self-sustaining, as he envisioned.
“You can’t do things overnight, you have to plan.”
He accepted that nature conservation was not profitable, but could be offset by tourism-generated income in future. “But not for a long time.”
Finally Kholwane expressed concern over conditional grants which were not growing since departments were insufficiently spending the money. He claimed they had improved overspending in previous years, but added proper planning and early warning systems, which had been in place this past year, were meant to help departments improve this year.
Members from opposition were as unimpressed with the underspending of conditional grants. Mr Collen Sedibe, provincial leader of the EFF said, “We are not happy about the speech. It doesn’t help us. For the people of Mpumalanga things will remain the same. There will be no development.”
He said the allocation toward agriculture was meagre and showed the ANC had no interest in the land issue. “Without land you are nothing. You can use it for human settlements and agriculture to be self-sufficient.” He didn’t like the planned reduction of staff either. “We need human capital to deliver services.”
Mr Cleopas Maunye, Bushbuckridge Residents Association leader said his party shared concerns over the poor spending of conditional grants.
“We believe that as a province we can do better. The provincial leadership need to strengthen our administration in relations to planning and implementations of desired projects to remedy the poor spending on conditional grants, and more engineers must be appointed.”
He urged departments to appoint a chief financial officer in health as it failed to deliver its set objectives. “We hope that Kholwane will restructure the management of MEGA for us to improve the economic growth of our province. We need competent people in economics for MEGA to perform.”
He welcomed the allocation for water reticulation, given the water-service backlog. “We trust this money to be transferred to municipalities will be managed to achieve set objectives.”
Mr Anthony Benadie, DA MPL, said the speech was a mixed bag of hope and despair. “With R215 million less in the provincial coffers then the 2014/15 financial year, the budget leaves much to be desired. With Mpumalanga’s economic growth rate having been revised downwards to 1,9 per cent and a conservative definition of unemployment at 26,6 per cent, the DA expected Kholwane to blow us away with some truly radical budgetary changes.
Changes that would see the economic aspiration of the province fully realised. But instead, we got comments like ‘reducing compensation of employees from 60 per cent to 58,3 per cent is keeping a lean, professional and accountable workforce,’ which is laughable at best.”
He commended greater support for the absorption of social worker graduates and the filling of critical posts in the health department.
- See more on the previous budget here.
