Honourable Speaker
Honourable Premier
Honourable Members of the Executive Council
Honourable Deputy Speaker
Honourable Members of the Legislature
Honourable Members of the Traditional Leader’s House
Distinguished Guests.
Ndiyabulisa.
A few weeks ago I stood before you to table the provincial budget. Today, I stand before you to outline how we are going to spend the budget we have been allocated as a department. The Provincial Planning and Treasury (PPT) department will implement decisive policies in the 2013/14 financial year with the aim of continuing to provide support to departments, entities and municipalities as well as monitoring and reporting on financial management and outcomes in the province.
Honourable Speaker, in 2012 our focus as a department was largely on the following priorities:
- Providing hands-on support to municipalities;
- Elimination of non-core expenditure;
- Manage the escalating cost of Compensation of Employees;
- Enforce full compliance with the PFMA and the MFMA in an effort to improve financial management; and
- Establishing the Provincial Planning Commission.
Honourable Speaker, the department managed to achieve most of these set targets and will also forge ahead to ensure the successful completion of the remaining targets.
The 2012 departmental highlights are, to name a few:
- The implementation of reprioritisation initiatives yielded much needed savings that were utilised to fund core-service delivery programmes to improve the lives of our people.
- Much improvement was recorded in both departments and municipalities on their compliance with the MFMA and the PFMA. Of note is the improvement in the compliance with the Accountability model which promotes accountability and a control environment.
- The implementation of a streamlined and dedicated hands on support for municipalities was slow in its initial stages due to challenges in sourcing the requisite expertise. However, by the end of February 2013 we had managed to appoint and deploy 13 officials to 10 targeted municipalities around the province.
- The efficient management and monitoring of the provincial Compensation of Employees budget in departments of Health and Education resulted in the halting of escalating costs in this line item.
- In 2012/13, Treasury committed itself to improving the its oversight role over public entities which resulted in the inclusion of public entities in the budget process as well as improved compliance with the PFMA and a focus on trying to improve understanding the business of public entities.
- The long-term development plan is currently being drafted after the successful establishment and operationalisation of the Planning Commission.
- In 2012, the department embarked on an organisational transformation that will ultimately ensure an innovative way of “thinking” and “doing” to appropriately position the Provincial Planning and Treasury in a space where we are more focused on active support, monitoring and reporting on finance and performance of the provincial departments and entities.
This is approached as a long term sustainability process that will ensure cultural transformation is not negotiable within our department. Currently, executive coaching is provided to our most senior officials and the organisational structure is being aligned to correctly redirect our resources to our core functions.
Honourable Speaker, in the past year Treasury learnt a lot of lessons particularly in the Health and Education sectors. What we have learnt will inform the way we interact and improve our service to the provincial government in their quest to provide services to our people.
Full speech [PDF]
