KwaZulu-Natal Legislature  

PIETERMARITZBURG: 5 August 2009

Madam Speaker

I would like to focus on the issues that did not feature in the Hon. MEC's DVD presentation, as interesting as it was.

The challenge for the Department of Social Development in the next three years is twofold: it has to find savings to cover its past over-expenditure and its has to effect the compulsory 7.5 percent budget cut necessitated by the prospect of reduced tax revenue.

The provincial Treasury made an appeal to this department as far back as January 2009 to implement radical cost-cutting to contain its spending trends in the past financial year, particularly in its Goods and Services. This is traditionally the department’s main cost driver. Many of the items in question – such as catering, advertising, audio-visual services, entertainment and gifts - only remotely relate to service delivery.

Some of this overspending is indeed gross overspending. Transport for public events, for example, spent R8.25-million more than its budget of just R50,000 while expenditure on many other items occurred without any budget at all. It is to be hoped that this sort of expenditure will be avoided in the current financial year.

One stubborn item concerns payments on the lease of property and equipment and these possibly include costs which the department is battling to recover from the South African Social Security Agency. The Hon. MEC has already indicated that communication with SASSA remains difficult. We in the IFP sympathise. We have consistently objected to the ANC government's tendency to centralise provincial government departments. SASSA is operating out of its office in Pretoria with little infrastructure of its own on the ground in our province.

Madam Speaker, the finance portfolio committee has received and accepted a solid commitment from the Hon. MEC to finding savings to repay the past over-expenditure. The MEC has pledged to recover funding earmarked for OSD for social workers in the past financial year but spent elsewhere in order to implement OSD in the current financial year. The last hurdle in the way of its implementation was removed when the OSD agreement was eventually signed in June.

The Hon. MEC - to his credit – has been vocal about the plight of the weak and vulnerable, particularly children. The MEC has done a great deal to generate public debate on the subject of orphans and children heading households.

However, there are many worrying aspects of his department’s current budget in terms of the province’s ability to meet its obligations in respect of the Children’s Act.

The Child Care and Protection Services sub-programme is the sub-programme that most directly relates to this Act. KwaZulu-Natal’s allocation for this sub-programme for 2009/2010 - at R340-million - is only a little more than half of the R600-million allocated for the same sub-programme by Gauteng province in its current budget. This is a matter of concern since the two provinces have more or less the same number of children, and KwaZulu-Natal has a much higher poverty rate than Gauteng. This means that KwaZulu-Natal is likely to have more children in need of government-funded services and should therefore be allocating more to this sub-programme than Gauteng.

The poor spending on HIV and AIDS – within the same programme - is disconcerting given that this province has the highest HIV prevalence levels in the country. Because the pandemic is more advanced in KwaZulu-Natal than in any other province, the impact in terms of number of orphans will be relatively more acute. It seems that the under-spending on HIV and AIDS may have been part of the general cutback in planned expenditure within the Social Welfare Services programme.

This cut-back was made in order to cover unplanned expenditure in Programme 1: Administration. This is controversial considering that Programme 1 does not focus on service delivery, while Welfare Services is almost exclusively aimed at service delivery.

Similarly, the Crime Prevention and Support sub-programme shows dramatic decreases in allocations if one compares the amounts published in the 2008 and 2009 budget statements. Firstly, for 2008/2009 the adjusted estimate is 32 percent lower than the original budget allocation. Further, the province’s estimate of what it would actually spend was 38 percent lower than the original allocation.

Thus, as with HIV and AIDS there was serious under-spending in 2008/2009. The estimates for 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 are, respectively, 15 percent and 9 percent lower than the estimates published for these budget years in 2008. Overall, the allocation over the three years is 15 percent lower than estimated in the 2008 budget statement.

While the department’s budget statement is frank about the inadequate community infrastructure, especially for early childhood development, as well as very poor working conditions for the people who staff them, the department is currently failing to expedite funding to many non-profit organisations. NPOs (both non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations) provide a large proportion of the department’s social welfare services.

The department supports the NPOs concerned by way of subsidies, although these subsidies generally do not cover the full cost or scope of their services. The non- payment of subsidies to crèches, in particular, has created a full-blown crisis for children, teachers and NPOs in uMkhanyakude District and elsewhere in the province. If there is an ongoing audit, why was this information not communicated to those whom it concerns?

Without warning or explanation, departmental subsidies paid to hundreds of crèches stopped in January and the operators have continued to keep their facilities open under extremely difficult circumstances. Many teachers have not been paid a cent this year, and children are required to bring their own food. Many go hungry day by day although some are on ARVs. Apparently, the non-payment of subsidies has not prevented the Department of Social Development from penalising the management of these crèches for not adhering to the set menus.

As the Hon. MEC now told us, all crèches are required to sign Service Level Agreements with the department which are binding and run from March to March. Most of the crèches have signed theirs on the 31st of March this year but still receive no subsidies.

However, there are isolated examples of crèches which have been receiving subsidies despite the fact that they are not in possession of a signed Service Level Agreement for 2009/2010. This suggests total chaos and we urge the Hon. MEC to intervene and see to the needs and rights of the affected children as well as those who devote their time to looking after them.

The Hon. MEC also runs a department which is taking direct steps to fill vacancies that exist in the labour market. The provincial Department of Social Development is granting bursaries to students from disadvantaged communities and poor families to study social work which is a scarce skill in the department. The idea is that students would be provided with job opportunities once they completed their degrees.

What is confusing here is that the national Department of Social Development has a social work scholarship programme which probably more than covers the number of social work students that our universities can accommodate at present. The national department has urged provinces not to run separate programmes for this since a single national programme allows for better coordination with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, which administers the programme. The national department argues that such a national programme could accommodate provincial needs by heads of the provincial departments meeting and agreeing on issues such as provincial quotas.

Meanwhile, provinces could focus their attention and funds on other types of social  has gone against this approach on the basis of provincial autonomy of decision-making.

Scholarships for social workers are listed under national priorities. The national department would argue that they are, indeed, national priorities, but priorities that should be funded by national rather than provincial departments.

This would amount to a saving in the provincial budget without impacting negatively on the pool of social workers available to fill vacancies in the department. On a lighter note, we in the Official Opposition have no doubt that the department will also consider saving money on repairs to its vehicles. At the peak of recent blue lights incidents, the Hon. MEC’s VIP unit was the worst offender. 11 of the department’s cars were involved in avoidable accidents with two of the cars having to be written off.

Madam Speaker, the Hon. MEC and his department have a lot of hard work ahead of them and we on the opposition benches are happy to assist them with their tasks if they will allow us.

I thank you.

Contact: Roman Liptak, 078 302 0929