1. Hon. Speaker, a heartfelt Eid Mubarak to our Muslim community and Akshaya Tritiya to the Hindu community, for prosperous beginnings. Hon. members, KZN has the second highest equitable share of R 139, 557 billion of which R114, 509 in equitable share and R25, 041 in conditional grants.
2. The recent floods see an additional R1 billion allocated to KZN.
3. The substantive changes to the 2022 DORA Bill clauses need emphasis in all committees, to ensure efficient spending.
4. A general overview of the bottlenecks all departments face are:
   -Rationalisation of structure, assets and entities
   -Production of a real-time staff organogram
   -Fully-fledged internal audit; M&E; SCM; legal, research and donor units
   -Critical posts such as project managers and MBA graduates for senior posts even in entities
   -Presentation of plans before reports for all policy directed programmes
   -The skewed implementation of BBEEE, AA and EE policies
   -The implementation of RACET and RET with no physical policy seen or adopted by the KZN Legislature
   -The political will to harness assistance through CSI or CSR activities
   -The political will to work with NGO’s that can promote and add value to departmental strategic goals
   -The strengthening of risk management units and ethical empowerment programmes
   -The “silo” mentality of departments in their response or lack thereof to climate change response
   -The need for a permanent integrated provincial and municipal disaster management unit
   -The uniform adoption of ICT as a separate departmental budget line item, and
   -The development of good regulations to enforce our laws
5. These will pave way for a capable state and we will have effective corporate governance and meet the 4 objectives of the PFMA.
6. Hon. Premier, almost 30 years into democracy, KZN needs to lead the way by implementing less government and more governance requiring cabinet focus.
7. Voting on this budget is the most significant part of our work as Hon. MPL’s. The bulk of service delivery is located in the Province and our portfolio committees are the engine rooms to fuel spending and performance in the face of annual crisis management.
8. The Minority Front supports the reports of the finance and STACOV committees and the commitment of all members.
9. Thank you.

Hon. S. Thakur-Rajbansi