ALL FOR BETTER FUTURE

MEC lends an ear to salient issues

Bulelwa Tunyiswa, the MEC for sport, recreation, arts and culture, gave her department’s stakeholders a chance to evaluate their performance during a stakeholders’ session on Monday.

Tunyiswa hosted 165 stakeholders at the Eastern Cape Audio Visual Centre in East London where people got an opportunity to make submissions on what issues needed to be prioritised in the sixth administration and the new financial year.

Tunyiswa said the session was to improve the government’s performance for the betterment of people’s lives. It also highlighted the department's achievements and challenges.

“This financial year, the department has worked very hard to improve an unqualified audit opinion.

“For the past three financial years, the department has been receiving unqualified audit opinions.

“We need to strive for a clean audit. We have set up teams to complement the strategic management unit so as to support line function programmes to improve on the area of performance information.

“The department also acknowledges continued irregular expenditure and has managed to identify the root causes which is poor contract management.

“It has also recognised data as an enabler of information. Therefore, the contract management process has been automated,” said Tunyiswa.

She said that meant that timeous notification regarding contracts that were about to expire would be made available to relevant programme managers for swift action.

“Contract management is now made a standing item in every finance committee meeting for monitoring purposes.

“We will also explore the implementation of a Business Intelligence (BI) tool for timeous reporting of all the outstanding invoice payments especially to SMMEs so that relevant programmes meet the 30-day turnaround times.”

Thulani Mhlungulwana of Buffalo City Boxing Federation said the engagement session was a fruitful exercise that needed to be done more often.

“As a local boxing federation we really appreciate this opportunity we got with the MEC.

“Because we, as the boxing fraternity, have many challenges and in that session with the department we got a platform to raise those. And the feedback we got was promising.”

In the session we got the chance to raise our boxing challenges

Picture: RANDELL ROSKRUGE ALL EARS: MEC for sport Bulelwa Tunyiswa, Vuyani Morgan Limba, chairperson of the sport and recreation committee, and Mzolisi Matutu, head of department, at the stakeholders’ meeting on Monday.