Nkwinti battles to clean up mess
Delivering his budget speech in Parliament on Tuesday, Water and Sanitation Minister Gugile Nkwinti said his department was struggling to deal with the realities of budget constraints and challenges emanating from previous years, as some historical commitments were not adequately budgeted for.
The financial mismanagement in the past few years has come back to haunt the Department of Water and Sanitation.
Delivering his budget speech in Parliament on Tuesday, Water and Sanitation Minister Gugile Nkwinti said his department was struggling to deal with the realities of budget constraints and challenges emanating from previous years, as some historical commitments were not adequately budgeted for.
Nkwinti provided a frank assessment of the state of his department, which is mired in a financial crisis.
Earlier in 2018, Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts and the water committee resolved to establish a commission of inquiry into the affairs of the department.
Its crisis has largely been attributed to poor leadership, deviations over the years, including duplicate payments, spending on projects that were not budgeted for, and payments for incomplete projects. The department was led by Nomvula Mokonyane, who was shifted to the communications portfolio in the 2018 cabinet reshuffle.
“We have also noted with concern that in certain instances contracts without a value have been entered into and these pose difficulty in accurately budgeting for them, which leaves the department vulnerable,” said Nkwinti.
The auditor-general has previously flagged the department for incurring billions of rand in irregular expenditure.
“Poor project management has created a situation whereby service providers are accelerating the work at a much faster pace than what the department had budgeted for,” he said.
Nkwinti said the department has had to reprioritise some of its major infrastructure projects, among them the Giyani Water Project, raising the wall of Clanwilliam Dam and the critical Mzimvubu Water Project in the Eastern Cape.
The department had resolved to reduce its construction costs by in-sourcing some of these projects to its construction unit. He said it was also looking to approach the courts to nullify all open-ended contracts and to discipline those involved.
DA MP Leon Basson told Nkwinti: “Your department is in ICU, with a toxic virus called Nomvula Mokonyane that has infected the department to its core…. This department is bankrupt with unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure as the new norm.”
Basson said Mokonyane needs to take full responsibility for the mess and she “definitely has a case to answer for failing millions of people struggling without water”.