The Gauteng Provincial Treasury has improved financial management in the province over the past four years, ensuring that available resources are used to fund key service delivery programmes.
“A robust cash management practice throughout this political term of office has resulted in positive cash flow levels for the provincial government. This essentially means that the province has sufficient cash to fund the needs of departments. Equally important, prudent investment of our revenues has improved liquidity in the province”, Gauteng Finance MEC Mandla Nkomfe says.
“We have taken hard decisions to ensure that we remained prudent about overall spending, putting emphasis firmly on reprioritisation and better quality of expenditure,” Nkomfe says.
Treasury will, amongst other things, use this financial year to maintain clean audits already achieved and work to improve the audit outcomes of other departments and provincial entities.
“We are committed to ensuring that local government works better. We are therefore working on strengthening the capacity of municipal internal audit units, asset management units and audit committees. We believe that these measures will ensure that we achieve clean audits and improve service delivery to our people,” Nkomfe adds.
Furthermore, the Debt Management Committee which was established in 2009 to facilitate payment of outstanding government debt owed to municipalities continued to receive great support.
To date, more than R2 billion has been transferred to municipalities from various departments within the province. These funds have assisted in easing budgetary constraints in some municipalities and ensured service delivery to communities.
Treasury is working on broadening the scope of the Debt Management Committee to include national departments and parastatals utilising the services of municipalities in the province. The aim is to ensure that payments for consumption of those services are made to the respective municipalities.
Treasury is continuing the regulatory and monitoring function on public private partnerships in the province. Our focus in this financial year is diversifying the project portfolio and exploring other sectors such as water, housing and transport. Our view is that PPPs could play an important role in overcoming service delivery and infrastructure challenges in these sectors and we need to showcase their value add in this regard.
That is why we will intensify stakeholder engagement about PPPs in particular in the local government sector. Our focus will be on encouraging municipalities to explore PPPs as an alternative approach to address the delivery of public services to our communities.
For more information contact:
John Sukazi, MEC Spokesperson
Tel: 011 355 2161
Cell: 083 772 4885
E-mail: john.sukazi@gauteng.gov.za
