Cabinet to look at aligning NDP with national budget - Radebe

16 August 2016

Pretoria - The four-day Cabinet Lekgotla currently underway in Pretoria will look at how best to align the National Development Plan to the country’s budget, so as to ensure targets are met, Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe said on Tuesday.

"One of the agenda items I will be presenting is the alignment of the NDP with the national budget," Radebe told reporters at the presidential guest house where the meeting is taking place.

"In January of this year, Cabinet took a decision that the Department of Planning and Monitoring and the National Treasury needs to look at this whole budget and see how we reprioritise during this time of fiscal constraint so that we deal with the apex of our priorities to ensure that our National Development Plan is aligned with the national budgets."

He added that President Jacob Zuma would be making an overall strategic input that would set the tone of the agenda for the meeting.

"The minister of finance will be making a presentation on the global domestic micro-economy and fiscal situation. We are going to go into details about the implementations of the nine-point plan. We need to see where we are right now, so that we can be able to accelerate this towards 2019. There will be a full report on the national infrastructure programme and its implementation," he said.

Radebe also said the issue of free education and fee increments would be under the spotlight, but declined to elaborate to what extent and in which shape.

"The issue of education is our apex priority and obviously we are going to be dealing with matter. We need to give time to the consultation process. As also highlighted by the statement of the governing party over the past four days, that matter is one of our top priorities," he said.

This article first appeared on News24, see here.