Oscar Mabuyane

Finance MEC in the Eastern Cape, Oscar Mabuyane, has delivered an R82 billion budget for the province with the lion’s share going to education.

Speaking at the Bhisho Legislature on Tuesday, Mabuyane said that though the province’s economy was not at the desired growth levels, it has the hallmarks of reaching growth levels of three percent that the province’s economy reached before the 2008 global economic downturn.

Education and health took up 75% of the budget, getting R36 billion and R25 billion respectively.

“Education and health are taking 75% of the budget because of our programme of skills revolution and of having a healthy society,” he said.

Mabuyane – who took over the role of finance MEC last year following the reshuffle of the provincial cabinet which saw him replace Sakhumzi Somyo – was delivering his maiden budget speech.

It was also the last speech for the fifth administration in the province.

He said the Eastern Cape needed to deal with bad audit outcomes from the Auditor-General.

“We must ensure that this issue of bad audit outcomes is history. We cannot wait for the Auditor-General to tell us that we are not doing right when there are people employed and the legislature is meant to do that and there are people like internal audit committees, even in municipalities, but due to dereliction of duty people simply decide not to care ... we should be considering going back to operation clean audit,” said Mabuyane.

The MEC said he found it odd that some municipalities in the province could move from an unqualified audit opinion to a disclaimer within a year.

He warned that those who are not doing their jobs would not be tolerated.

“With this six-forward speed we are moving on there is no one that will be wobbling. Everyone is going to move in one direction and must have his or her safety belt on because people out there are losing patience with all these excuses we are making at a point of delivery,” said Mabuyane.

Bobby Stevenson, DA leader at the provincial legislature, said there were no bold pronouncements on the budget to highlight a shift from consumption expenditure to investment expenditure.

“Not a word was mentioned about reducing the provincial wage bill and I would have expected after the minister of finance’s statement as well about looking at voluntary retirement packages, that there would be some pronouncements about this.

“We were told in the last budget that public entities would be rationalised. It’s a year later and nothing has happened. The big elephant in the room is the provincial wage bill and there has been no firm pronouncement about it,” he said.

He said the province was on an unsustainable path and needs to have a shift towards investing in hospitals, roads and education.

Thando Mpulu, chief whip of the United Democratic Movement, said though the plans coming from the budget were good they could not be delivered because the fiscal was constrained.

“More than 60 percent of the fiscal goes towards compensation of employees and you still have goods and services and consultants that you need to have in mind. Now after having extrapolated all those figures you ask yourself how much is left for service delivery.

“All these plans that government has are going to fall flat because we don’t have money to deliver them. What the MEC should have emphasised on was the issue of fiscal consolidation,” he said.

Luthando Bara, president of the Black Business Forum, said the budget was balanced taking into consideration the constraints imposed by the global economic climate.

“As business we are particularly happy that more emphasis is given to the issue of the late payment of suppliers. We hope that this is the last time we are having this particular discussion.

“We also welcome the stimulus package that has been set up for start-up businesses. We want to also implore government to spend more time to support those start-ups, to provide research and skills that they need for them to be successful. We are also happy that tourism got a mention because as a province that does not have mines, tourism needs to be jerked up so that it can create the number of jobs that the province requires,” said Bara.