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Today’s budget speech debate shows why it failed to truly address the needs of the people of Limpopo. It is more of the same talk of socio-economic recovery and sectors that would provide employment opportunities and economic growth but not enough action!

This speech failed to speak to creating enough opportunities to secure the future of Limpopo’s unemployed youth. In his speech MEC Sekoati highlighted sectors like construction and manufacturing, that could contribute significantly to our provincial economy, but instead of growing these sectors, they continue to haemorrhage jobs. The latest QLFS showed thousands of job losses in the manufacturing, agriculture, trade, finance and community and social services sectors.

It remains concerning that the compensation of employees accounts for about 67% of the total budget, this remains quite high considering the high number of critical vacancies and leaves very little resources to actually provide services to the people of Limpopo.

MEC Sekoati’s budget speech allocates R40.029 billion (48.2%) to Education and R24.639 billion (29.7%) to Health, and these departments continue to significantly underperform while they receive 77.9% of the province’s budget. These departments are characterised by classroom shortages, the poor state of school sanitation, poor healthcare infrastructure, medical staff shortages and excessively high medical legal claims. These departments need to produce improved services and more value for the money spent.

The province continues to struggle to ensure consequence management and effective controls within departments. The PFMA general report 22/23 states that the province’s overall audit outcomes regressed. Non-Compliance with regulations also continue to affect departments and the Department of Education at R1.96 billion accounts for over half of the R3.61 billion in irregular expenditure and RAL for R1.33 billion.

It is unacceptable that only 2.2% of the budget is provincial own generated revenue and it is not enough to support the development needs of the province. In addition to this, Revenue enhancement strategies need to be explored and efforts to generate more revenue need to be intensified.

Entities like GAAL, GNT and Corridor Mining Resources are in financial distress and cannot collect enough revenue to fund their own operations, or contribute to the province’s own revenue.

While the speech mentions efforts by the Provincial Treasury to support municipalities and allocated funds for Municipal Intervention Capacity Building, the province’s municipalities are still characterized by poor performance in terms of their financial health, completion of infrastructure projects and the rendering of services, in particular water provision.

The DA will be closely monitoring how this budget will be implemented and spent by all government departments and entities.

Issued by Lindy Wilson MPL - DA Limpopo Spokesperson for Provincial Treasury