The Free State coffers are empty and the little money that is available to departments and municipalities must be properly allocated and managed. The new proposed medium-term budget for the period 2018 to 2021 does not really address the fundamental problems in the province and thus offers very little hope for improvement.
The National Treasury’s decision to decrease conditional allocations with R982 million is extremely worrisome, seeing as these allocations are used for infrastructure development and maintenance.
Poor financial management and the lack of proper control measures and skills in our departments and municipalities have lead to the province losing nearly R1 billion – just because money was not used correctly in the past.
The 13 000 job opportunities recently created by the agricultural sector is in glaring contrast to the government’s recent populist and inflammatory statements about land expropriation.
Despite a decrease in agricultural activities, the agricultural sector was still able to create thousands of jobs; this will, however, not be possible in a province with a very high unemployment rate if the government continues with its absurd plan of expropriation.
Once again, the budget serves as evidence of the ruling party’s misguided priorities and self-serving tendencies. A shining example of this is the allocation of R611 million to the Department of the Premier, which is nearly R200 million more than the R443 million that was allocated to the Department of
Cooperative Governance that is tasked with managing the Free State’s struggling municipalities.
The FF Plus would have liked to see the Free State Treasury focusing its resource allocation on the province’s struggling municipalities as well as on the Department of Health, where at grassroots level the Free State community is most vulnerable and dependent on the government.
Instead, however, the Treasury had to wring water from a flint by stretching an already reduced budget to make provision for the ANC’s thoughtless promises of free tertiary education.
The budget is not one that serves the best interests of the people in the Free State. It is a budget that is aimed at supporting the ANC’s election campaign for 2019.
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