In one of my recent articles, I wrote about the urgent need for the entire state budget to be reprioritised to ensure that spending is directed to meaningful service delivery.
It seems I am not alone in this appeal, as a recent letter to the editor in this paper by MPL Imraan Keeka reveals.
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In it, he decries the spending by the provincial Department of Education (DOE) on huge amounts for school opening ceremonies.
Non-essential
While the knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss this as cheap politicking as the writer is from the Democratic Alliance, the reality is this is exactly the type non-essential spending that I was referring to in my article.
My experience and observation across most provincial and government departments is that they excel and thrive on such projects – indeed the level of professionalism and expertise exhibited by the officials in the public relations or marketing offices of these departments is a sight to behold.
If only the level of project management evident at these events could be brought to ‘real’ service delivery programmes, community protests would be a thing of the past as we would see a significantly enhanced level of service delivery.
Judicious
I am not for one moment saying that community engagement and dialogue, or the celebration of achievements by government departments should be done away with, only that they be judiciously done, with an eagle eye kept on the costs involved.
It is imperative that department heads, both political and administrative, apply a more rigorous approach to budgeting and spending in the sectors they oversee to ensure that scarce resources are being directed to where they are most required.
How often have we seen a national department like Water Affairs spending millions on multi-page inserts in a national newspaper, while on the ground actual projects are languishing unfinished due to corruption or mismanagement?
Extravagance
Similarly, it is not unusual to see state owned entities put out glossy publications a few times a year, and generally, the extravagance of the publication is in inverse proportion to the financial performance of the entity.
After matriculating, Vijay Naidoo studied Economics in the UK. Upon his return, he joined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.
He subsequently joined his sister in their furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. He was responsible for all quality aspects of their products, and led the project to the business achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.
Mr Naidoo has an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing.
More recently, he has focused a lot of his time on giving back to the community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. He also sits on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.
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