Chairperson, Treasury stands at the heart of government. It is known all over that Treasury stands at the heart of all governance. Its policies directly affect the success or failure of all government programmes. Increasingly, Treasury and national government are devolving budgets and the responsibility for major national programmes to the provinces and local government.
A whole raft of critical national programmes is delegated downwards to these lower spheres of government. We must question the wisdom of this policy because the requisite capacity is lacking in these spheres of government. Daily, we read about the significant underspending of local and the provincial government levels. A cursory look at the conditional grants to municipalities bears testimony to this. For instance, Greater Giyani Municipality in Limpopo province spent R1,1 million of its R36 million grant. Buffalo City Municipality in the Eastern Cape spent just 13% of its grant and the North West province spent only 23% of the total infrastructure budget. Now, the same can be said about most municipalities in the provinces around the country. This shows the danger of devolving policy implementation before proper implementation mechanisms and capacities have been established. It is simply a waste of taxpayers' money to increase critical budgets when annually more than half of the budget allocations are returned to Treasury unspent.
Treasury must re-evaluate this policy. In addition to devolving budgets, billions of rands are wasted annually on corruption and irregular and wasteful expenditure. This occurs against the backdrop of a state that expects South Africans to pay more and more taxes and these are increasing all the time, while the taxpayers are not getting value for money.
These challenges point to the need for Treasury to improve the oversight and monitoring capacity in order to root out corruption and wasteful and irregular expenditure because taxpayers deserve real value for money. Thank you very much for not chasing me away before I have concluded. [Laughter.]