KwaZulu-Natal finance MEC Francois Rodgers tables his budget vote in the provincial legislature on Wednesday. (Supplied)
KwaZulu-Natal’s new finance MEC, Francois Rodgers, said on Wednesday that striving for clean audits and fulfilling service delivery commitments were “non-negotiable” for all municipalities, departments and public entities in the province, despite budget constraints.
“We must state that this government will implement a strict zero-tolerance approach to non-compliance to treasury regulations and prescripts. We want to ensure accountability,” Rodgers added.
He was speaking at the KwaZulu-Natal legislature in Pietermaritzburg while tabling the R680.901 million provincial treasury budget vote for 2024-25.
As a result of fiscal consolidation, R27.88 million had been cut from the budget, he said, a fate that other departments had also suffered.
That cut is expected to significantly impede provincial treasury’s ability to hire more accountants and auditors to assist departments, municipalities and state-owned entities to achieve clean audits and ensure financial governance. Rodgers said it was imperative that coats were cut according to the fiscal cloth, and that service delivery and clean governance remained a priority.
He was appointed to the portfolio on 18 June, following a power sharing agreement reached with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and others after the ANC lost its provincial majority in the May elections.
Known as a stickler for running a tight financial ship, within his first week, Rodgers closed the treasury’s secondary office in Durban, saying it would save the the department about R1.1 million annually.
The provincial treasury is often lauded as a beacon of good governance among other KwaZulu-Natal government departments, none of which have escaped scrutiny for various corruption scandals. This year marked the 16th consecutive clean audit for the department, said Rodgers.
He also said there would be a cut of 25% on nice-to-haves, including subsistence and travel (S&T). In the last financial year, a billion rand had been spent on S&T, he said.
He highlighted the severe fiscal constraints his department and others would be working under, saying that innovation was needed to keep the administration “financially afloat, cash positive, transformative — both economically and socially, and deepen good financial governance in all departments, municipalities and public entities”.
The provincial treasury is known as an historic under spender — one of the key reasons being the high level of vacancies in the department — but Rodgers said that preliminary year-end results indicated “that we have spent 98% of our budget at the end of the 2023-24 year and achieved 89% of all targets set, whilst a further 15 targets were overachieved due to the increase in demand for services”.
Although a commitment had been made to fill 146 posts in the department by 31 May this year, only 89 had been finalised, said Rodgers, the result of a lack of suitable candidates, posts being filled by internal candidates and other vacancies thus occurring, or resignations, with those who resigned moving to other departments.
While tabling the R784.153 million budget for the office of the premier on Tuesday, Premier Thami Ntuli said his office would roll out a new forensic case management system to help keep track of all forensic investigations across the provincial government. The system would make it easier to record, organise and monitor the investigations, he said.
The slow pace of forensic investigations by the premier’s office under previous ANC administrations, ostensibly for the protection of ANC leaders in government, had long been a bone of contention for both the DA and IFP.
At one point, in 2023, the office of the premier’s forensic investigations unit had on its books 73 unresolved cases, according to a report presented to the province’s standing committee on public accounts.
Ntuli also allocated R77.507 million to the Zulu royal household, slightly less than the R79 million allocated in 2023. The 2023 allocation was a hike of R12 million from the previous year.