Finance MEC, Mlungisi Mvoko, needs to spell out exactly how the province plans to improve service delivery through the efficient and effective use of this year’s financial allocations.
There is far too much money going to the bloated salaries of cadre-deployed millionaire managers and not enough spent on frontline staff who are at the coalface of service delivery. When you spend 65 cents of every rand on salaries, there is very little left for service delivery. This includes fixing roads and purchasing medicines and textbooks, for example.
The equitable share is limited, requiring the MEC to ensure that departments get the best value for money on the funds allocated to them.
In the Western Cape, a school was built in 65 days for R40 million, while our Education Department had to give back R100 million of its infrastructure grant funding because it could not spend it.
Now is the time for MEC Mvoko to show his teeth if he has any. There needs to be a clamp down on irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure, and real consequences for those officials responsible.
We also need decisive action from the MEC to rationalise those provincial state-owned entities that have become nothing more than employment institutions for the politically connected while bringing little to no value to the people of this province.
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