Creecy says ‘ready when you are’
The Gauteng treasury will only disburse money for infrastructure spend to “shovel-ready” projects, finance MEC Barbara Creecy said on Tuesday.
“In this financial year, we are doing things slightly differently,” Creecy told reporters in Johannesburg following the delivery of her budget speech to the provincial legislature.
“We are saying [that] unless departments have shovel-ready projects, we are not going to put the money into their baselines, because we don’t want situations where there is underspending, and you might have a situation where a particular department is underspending [when] another department could utilise that money,” she said.
“What we [are] doing is incentivising good behaviour. People who come on time with projects which are ready to roll are going to get the money.”
A total of R44.4bn has been reserved over the 2017 medium-term expenditure framework for infrastructure spend, Creecy said.
This figure had been split into R31.9bn, which was in the baseline of departments and R12.5bn, which was ring-fenced in an asset-financing reserve.
She said when departments were ready to roll out their projects, they could bid for the money in the reserve.
The MEC tabled a R108bn budget for the province, which included R10bn added to the baseline of departments to meet increased demand. Gauteng is the largest contributor to the country’s economy and accounts for 35% of SA’s GDP.
Creecy said the main priorities for the provincial government were education, health and infrastructure. The largest amount — R40.8bn — was allocated to education. This was up from R39.5bn.
The budget for the province’s public health system also increased, from R37.6bn in 2016-17, to R40.2bn in 2017-18.
Creecy announced that over the medium term, R893.8m of this had been allocated to support mental health patients. In the previous medium term, Gauteng spent about R700m.
This follows the recent deaths of at least 100 psychiatric patients who were moved from Life Esidimeni facilities to various unlicensed nongovernmental organisations.
“When we talk about costcutting, and there was an executive council decision on this, cost-cutting has to be on what we call noncore expenses, so it’s those expenses which we spend on ourselves as government,” she said. Noncore expenses included catering, branding, accommodation and travel.
“We have never, ever agreed in the executive council that we can diminish our statutory responsibilities and cut costs in that way.”
Creecy said the provincial government had saved R414m by cutting noncore expenses. Last year, it saved R386m by reducing interest paid on overdue accounts.