1. Hon. members, Happy Eid Mubarak to the Muslim Community and Akshaya Tritiya to the Hindu Community. Both mark the beginning of prosperity through benevolence.
2. Hon. members, this budget session has been a challenging period as we grapple with the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decrease in Equitable Share and minimal increase in conditional grants for this financial year means if we do not change the culture of “business as usual” of prior years over and under-spending which indicated weaknesses in the approach of performance budgeting we adopted terms before, we are sure to face chaos and anxiety.
3. The MF does not intend to sound alarmist but we must be realistic that we are weak in various aspects of disaster management. Our concern currently is with respect to the Department of Health and the vaccine roll-out. It is important for us to be in the know as to exactly how much are we paying for a single JJ and Pfizer vaccine. The MF has called for the opening of vaccine markets whereby the private sector must be allowed to negotiate with various producers and we must give the general public choices.
4. Hon. Speaker, we have passed many piece of Legislation in the recent years, we need to ensure that our Executive and senior-officials report on effective and efficient regulations more now as items on portfolio committees in order to implement laws, given the decreasing budgets we are facing. It is counterproductive to whip the public with rising costs of bureaucracy. The South African tax-base is not increasing at the rate required, hence we need training programmes and workshops on regulation-making in each cluster.
5. The MF acknowledges that we have not paid lip-service to corruption but unfortunately long-outstanding investigations and current cases are delayed by double-talk. Double-talk must never become a trademark of our politicians and bureaucrats. For far too long powerful committees have found it more convenient to cooperate with each other rather than taking adversarial positions to fight for justice.
6. Finally, the MF supports the Finance and STACOV reports but implores departments to avoid the credibility crises by violating our Constitutional spirit.

Hon. S. Thakur-Rajbansi