Madam Speaker and Deputy Speaker, Honourable Members of the Executive Council; Honourable Chief Whip of the Ruling Party;
Honourable Members of the Opposition
Honourable Chairpersons of Portfolio Committees;
Esteemed Members of the House;
Distinguished guests;
Ladies and gentlemen;
We are three days away from the 18th of July - the day that has been declared by the United Nation as the International Mandela Day. This declaration is in recognition of the former President's contribution to the culture of peace and freedom for humanity across the globe.
Every year on this day, we are called upon to devote at least 67 minutes of our time to helping others, this as a way of honouring President Mandela's legacy of relentless service to humanity.
President Nelson Mandela has left us an inheritance of racial harmony, promotion and protection of human rights, gender equality and the rights of the children and as well as the upliftment of the poor and underdeveloped communities.
In the words of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-Moon during the Mandela Day declaration at the UN, 'Nelson Mandela showed what is possible for our world, and within each one of us - if we believe, dream and work together. Let us continue each day to be inspired by his lifelong example and his call to never cease working for a better....world'.
During the occasion of his State of the Nation Address, President Jacob Zuma called on all of us to dedicate at least 67 minutes of our time to clean South Africa this year. This is the theme for this Year's Mandela day. We are called upon to clean-up our cities, towns, townships, villages, schools and beautify every part of our country. When our country is clean, our souls and spirits become clean, and therefore we will have a nation with clean conscience.
Madam Speaker;
The presentation of a Budget Vote in this august House is not a mere box-ticking exercise. This task is fundamentally linked to the constitutional values that underpin our Public Administration.
The constitution demands of us to run an administration that is characterised by some of the following principles:
- Efficient, economic and effective usage of resources,
- Transparent administration fostered by providing the public with timely, accessible and accurate information,
- Accountable public administration and Development orientated public administration.
This ANC government has a long established tradition of running an impartial government accountable to the broader community it serves.
Madam Speaker;
The Office of the Premier's core mandate is to coordinate the functions of the Provincial Administration, manage government performance, monitor and evaluate service delivery and foster clean governance in the province.
This is the direction to which we channel our allocated budgetary resources to.
Madam Speaker and Honourable members, the utilisation of these resources is guided by the ever- present reality that resources are not unlimited. Over and above this, we also take our guidance from the objectives of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA)and other related pieces of legislations.
The PFMA promotes the objectives of prudent financial management in order to maximise service delivery through the effective and efficient use of the limited resources.
The key objectives of the PFMA can be summarised as to:
- Modernise the systems of financial management in the public sector,
- Enable public sector managers to manage, but at the same time be held more accountable,
- Ensure timely provisioning of quality information.
- Eliminate wasteful and corrupt usage of public resources and assets.
Madam Speaker;
It is clear from these objectives that there is simply no room for wasteful and fruitless expenditure, unauthorised expenditure, fraud and related financial irregularities when dealing with public resources.
The law requires that we act in a prudent, cost effective and efficient manner; to act contrary is to act against the law. When we act against the law, there should be consequences which befit our actions. In this regard, the election manifesto of the ruling party is very clear. Our resolve remains clear, that any wrong doing should be followed by consequences.
Madam Speaker;
It is my concrete conviction that one of the finest ways to honour President Nelson Mandela, is to utilise the limited resources at our disposal to advance the dream of a better life for all our people.
This is the dream that President Nelson Mandela spent the rest of his life struggling to achieve.
As the Office of the Premier, we appreciate the fact that the pillars to realise this dream are found in the manifesto priorities of the ruling party, the ANC. It is for this reason that in this Financial Year, we will coordinate the functions of the Provincial Administration to ensure:
- The development of our rural communities, through agrarian and land reform,
- The expansion of the productive capacity of the economy to creation of jobs,
- The expansion of health care infrastructure and provisioning of primary health care services,
- The provisioning of adequate human settlement and related basic services
- The provisioning of quality education and training
- The expansion on water infrastructure and sanitation in far-flung areas and rural settlements of our province, and above all
- The fight against crime and corruption. Madam Speaker;
To operationalise its constitutional and legislative mandate, the Office of the Premier has four functional programmes, and these are:
- Administration
- Institutional development
- Policy and Governance
Programme 1: Administration Madam Speaker;
Administration as a Programme in the Office of the Premier is entrusted with the responsibility of providing administrative support to the Premier, Executive Council and the Director General in fulfilling their legislative function and in promoting good corporate governance.
The Programme is further divided into sub-programmes of Premier Support, Executive Management Support Services, Corporate Services and Financial Management.
Programme 2: Institutional Development
Madam Speaker;
Institutional Development as a programme ensures that policies, processes and systems that enable the provincial Administration to deliver services are in place.
The Programme has the following sub-programmes or areas of work:
- Strategic Human Resources
- Service Delivery Improvement
- Labour Relations and employment Health and wellness Programme
- Legal Services
- Provincial Government Information Office and
- Communication
Programme 3: Policy and Governance
Madam Speaker;
The programme on Policy and Governance in the Office of the Premier enables the office to implement the mandate to coordinate policy and Governance in the province.
As we have said during the State of the Province Address about a month ago, for us to achieve the objectives that we have set for ourselves, we are required to institutionalise long term planning, integration, coordination together with monitoring and evaluation.
Esteemed Members of the House;
We are all alive to the fact that this budget vote is taking place during a very taxing economic climate. Part of the realities of the current economic climate is that we are still recovering from a long period of a global recession.
This situation is aggravated by domestic factors such as the emerging culture of protracted strikes in strategic sectors of our economy such as mining and manufacturing.
The birthmark of this reality is that there is no sufficient tax revenue, either coming from income tax or business tax for the state to fund social programmes.
This reality therefore imposes on us the obligation of learning to do more with little resources. It is against this background that budgeting is unavoidably a calculated balancing act. As a Province we shall in this financial year strive for a better audit outcomes, which we could not obviously achieve for obvious reasons starting from the year 2011.
Madam Speaker;
It is therefore my honour to table before this esteemed House, the 2014/15 budget vote for the Office of the Premier for appropriation by this august house.
With this budget, honourable speaker, the Office of the Premier is taking the lives of the Limpopo people forward.
I thank you.
