Speaker, in the state of the nation address, the hon President promised the nation a whole host of new projects and two weeks later, the Minister of Finance announced the Budget to deliver on the President's commitments. But does this government actually have the ability across the board to spend the budgets allocated to it?
At the end of the third quarter of the financial year, that is December 2010, departments should generally have expanded 75% of their budgets. The fact is that overall expenditure by all the departments reached a level of only 73%, leaving billions of rand unspent.
The main perpetrators during this period were Public Works which spent 71,7%, Defence and Military Veterans which spent 70,9%, Rural Development 66,5%, Education 66%, Home Affairs 64%, Water Affairs 61% and Communications which spent a pathetically low 45,2%.
Underspending against budgets by only these departments mentioned, amounted to R5 billion at the end of the third quarter. No figures are available for the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities as this department neglected to submit figures to Treasury as required by the Public Finance Management Act, PFMA. I doubt if it had anything to crow about.
Major underspending occurred on important programmes such as the Expanded Public Works Programme and the infrastructure improvement programme, and there was no expenditure on the loveLife project. The main reason given for the failure to perform is almost always a lack of capacity, yet the departments do very little to fill their vacancies.
How does government aim to achieve service delivery objectives if the departments continuously fail to spend the money they have received? The situation might improve if government appoints competent managers and fires the comrades. Thank you. [Applause]