Finance: Departmental Close-out report for 2021/2022

Hon. members, departments are not performing optimally for various reasons including, COE dilemmas and weak planning in the case of the unspent DDM grants, posing roll-over or first charge challenges.
The fourth industrial revolution calls for an interface between digitalisation and Human Resource strategic management. Without human beings, technology will fail us, as we have not reached a stage where artificial intelligence can replace workers.
Therefore, each department needs to go back to the decisions this Legislature took in 2008 when we needed to fast-track transformation and service delivery; to achieve this, the labour-intensive departments had to engage in zero-based budgeting and review human resource organograms.
Active use must be made of the Balanced score- card which Provincial Treasury started using in order to align budgets to infrastructure, human resources requirements and service delivery needs.
For e.g. municipalities need to stick to the National Treasury guidelines to ring-fence infrastructure budgets. This will ensure efficient and effective budgeting and outputs.
The high vacancy rates, Hon.members impact on departments performance leading to staff burn-out which is unwarranted post COVID-19 and with the new flu strains we’re grappling with.
Speaker as a country, let alone KZN, the Minority Front strongly suggests that National Treasury must rethink frameworks for government, business and community partnerships to spend our budgets fruitfully, annually.
Thank you.