DURBAN - IN WHAT could be construed as a hint of what the KwaZulu-Natal provincial budget would look like, Finance MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube said the budget could be one of trade-offs.
Dube-Ncube was speaking at a KZN Provincial Treasury, Accounting Standards Board and South African Institute of Chartered Accountants seminar where various accounting practices were discussed.
Dube-Ncube, who was appointed Finance MEC in November last year, commented ahead of her budget speech next week.
“With Covid-19, we have to acknowledge that unfortunately we live in a world where resources are limited. It seems as we move forward, our budget will always be one of trade-offs and infinite opportunity costs. In order to finance one priority, it will mean that the other priority has to be put aside. That is the sad reality,” she said.
She said even with the Covid-19 induced problems, there were people who did not perform their duties diligently. Further, she said if one looked at the Auditor General’s report one would see a large number of cases of non-compliance and collapse in governance.
“You just have to look at how much money is lost to unauthorised, fruitless and wasteful as well as irregular expenditure to appreciate fully the potential that our resources could do.
“While undeniably limited, the financial resources could be stretched to ensure that service delivery is not compromised. It is for this reason that I will be working closely with you,” she said.
Dube-Ncube said risk management teams needed to be established that would provide oversight in areas that were vulnerable to corrupt practices like supply chain management units.
This was not the only matter the Finance MEC addressed. The use of technology, she said, needed to be looked at and adopted.
“I am interested to know your state of readiness to use blockchain technologies, artificial intelligence and big data analytics. We need to have more discussion around this. There is an urgent need to rollout automated risk management systems, including integrated Supply Chain Management automation on blockchain and artificial intelligence. In addition, I believe that we need to focus on project-based budgeting and performance on automated cloud solutions. We must deal with poor document management, insufficient financial resources. We must also attend to daily and monthly reconciliations to ensure that these are being done,” she said.
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