Parliament, Tuesday, 16 May 2017 – The Standing Committee on Appropriations was briefed by National Treasury on Tuesday on the 2017 Appropriation Bill.

The objective of the Bill is to appropriate money from the National Revenue Fund for the requirements of the State for the 2017/18 financial year; to prescribe conditions for the spending of funds withdrawn for the 2018/19 financial year before the commencement of the Appropriation Act for the 2018/19 financial year; and to provide for matters incidental thereto.

Briefing the Committee, Minister of Finance Mr Malusi Gigaba said: “We are living in interesting times when we try to pursue radical socio-economic transformation and inclusive growth in an environment of a tight fiscal position. Our level of economic growth is quite low and last year we saw an improvement and expect further improvement this year and still this is not sufficient to ensure sustainable growth in employment, sustainable growth in the reduction of poverty, inequality and a substantive involvement of women, youth and black people and poor communities in economic activities and it’s not sufficient to increase our revenue base so that we can grow the fiscus.”

He added that “the Budget reflects some choices that we are making on one hand to redistribute resources and incomes and pay attention to the poor through continuing spending on social and basic services in a manner that the poor are not further marginalised”.

Minister Gigaba said the Budget needs to pay attention to matters of inclusive growth and that these are areas that they will be focusing on in the coming years. The Budget provides for the support of small, medium and micro enterprises, infrastructure rollout and they will continue to pay attention and to increase the efficiency of state-owned enterprises and their ability to spend and improve their governance processes, and improve their financial health and achieve their developmental mandate.

Committee Chairperson, Ms Yvonne Phosa, welcomed the presentation by the Minister and National Treasury. “We are satisfied with the comments by the Minister as you have heard, he does not mince his words on radical socio-economic transformation. We have moved away from our plans. We want impact (value for money) on the Budget that has been targeted for service delivery,” said Ms Phosa.

The Committee noted that there are clearly no additional resources and the Budget has clearly been a reprioritisation of limited resources. In addition to the baseline reductions, funds were sourced from within programme budgets and reallocated from lower-priority areas to those of greater priority within and across functions. As Members indicated, oversight and accountability must be improved significantly. Partnerships are important, the performance of SOEs (state-owned enterprises) and indeed other stakeholders, all these are crucial for transformation and growth. The Committee feels strongly on the fact that issues of performance in key government programmes such as sanitation, ICT (information and communications technology) and other priorities are resolved.

Ms Phosa said progress in attaining the NDP (National Development Plan) and MTSF (Medium-Term Strategic Framework) targets is not where it should be. “In addition, within the current difficult fiscal context, it is imperative that all activities planned in the 2017 Budget must be successfully carried out. And they must be done effectively and efficiently. It is thus our responsibility as this Committee to ensure that our limited resources are allocated to those areas where the radical transformation of our society and rapid inclusive growth of our economy have the best possibility of being realised,” she said.

ISSUED BY PARLIAMENTARY COMMUNICATION SERVICES ON BEHALF OF THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, MS YVONNE PHOSA 

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