The people's money must be spent with care

Note to editors: This is an extract based on a speech to be delivered by DA spokesperson on the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Dr Dion George MP, during today's debate on the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation budget vote.

This year, an amount of R174 million rand is budgeted to improve government service delivery through performance monitoring and evaluation. A further R376 million is budgeted for the National Youth Development Agency. To test whether previous allocations of the people's money to these functions have been wisely spent, we need to ask whether service delivery is improving and youth unemployment is reducing. 

Unfortunately, the answers are no.        

The Democratic Alliance agrees with the National Planning Commission that we require urgent measures to address our most pressing needs, particularly high levels of unemployment, and especially among the youth. The DA's 8% growth project will soon set out how economic activity in South Africa can be accelerated, so that there is an open opportunity for all of our youth to find a place in our economy and become everything that they are capable of being.

With 70% of our population aged under the age of 35, we have an enormous competitive advantage to harness if we make the right policy choices. The National Youth Development Agency isn't one of them. Youth unemployment continues to climb. More than 50% of young people aged between 18 and 25 are unemployed and 73% of the unemployed in South Africa are below the age of 35, the worst statistic amongst comparable economies. This pattern must, and can, be broken.         

In the Western Cape, the DA Government has implemented a youth apprenticeship scheme that will create economic opportunities for unemployed young people who would otherwise remain on the side-lines, trapped in the ideological minefield that prevents the National Treasury from implementing a youth wage subsidy scheme that would throw open the doors to employment opportunities for 423 000 young South Africans. 

Instead of funding a bloated bureaucracy, where 46% of the budget is paid to overvalued and underperforming cadres in the National Youth Development Agency, the people's money could be better spent on extending a youth wage subsidy and adding value to the lives of the youth on whose behalf they claim to be operating. Instead of funding drunken parties under the pretext of social cohesion, the people's money could be better spent on bursaries for deserving students and educational facilities for learners still emerging from an education system fundamentally damaged by Apartheid and still not fixed.

The DA Youth has championed the implementation of a national youth wage subsidy. Yesterday, they marched legally and peacefully to highlight COSATU's opposition to a youth wage subsidy that has paralysed government's action on its promised implementation. Yesterday, COSATU demonstrated its disdain for democracy. Freedom of expression and freedom to peacefully protest did not reign yesterday. It rained rocks. I picked up a rock next to the head of an injured and bleeding young man who dared to exercise his rights. Under our previous government, his rights may have been crushed by the Apartheid police. Yesterday, it was COSATU that tried, illegally and shamefully, to crush the rights to which we are all entitled. It won't succeed and our marches will continue.   

The National Youth Development Agency cannot properly account for loans it provided for so-called business start-ups, yet plans to spend R40 million more than its budget because it believes that it will collect on outstanding loans. This is creative accounting and an example of the low standards in managing public finances to which the Auditor-General referred last week.       

The Standing Committee on Public Accounts, SCOPA, has held 14 hearings on the finances and management of departments and entities since February this year. Seven annual financial statements were qualified, three were disclaimed and one was adverse. The findings from this small sample of annual financial statements scrutinised were R7.6 billion in irregular expenditure, where the people's money was spent without compliance to the applicable laws and regulations, and R201 million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure of the people's money that would not have occurred if reasonable care had been exercised.         

The pattern emerging from SCOPA hearings is that few Ministers consider their attendance to be a high priority. Only two out of nine ministers were present for the full hearings. Last week, the Minister of Mineral Resources failed to appear and never submitted an apology. Her deputy wasn't present either.

Officials from the Department were present, but were unable to account for fruitless and wasteful expenditure, a common theme across departments. Accounting Officers pass through the revolving doors of government departments at breath-taking speed, creating a vacuum in accountability, not filled by the executive. By the time the financial statements reach SCOPA, the director-general has already left the service of the department and escapes accountability. 

A variation on this trend is the rotation of Ministers, as evidenced in the Department of Public Works. The Minister appeared before SCOPA, stated that his department is dysfunctional, and promised that it would be turned around. The previous Ministers are not held to account and neither are the officials. There is also no sign of the collective accountability that the executive is expected to uphold. This needs to change. SCOPA will invite the Minister for a discussion on the matter of executive accountability and I hope that you will attend.

Minister, are you evaluating the performance of government in the management of the people's money? The Special Investigations Unit says that R30 billion leaks from the public financial system every year. We know that all public financial systems are leaky buckets, but the South African system is starting to more closely resemble a spaghetti strainer, rapidly draining the people's money into the troughs of politically connected cronies where they feast at the expense of the most vulnerable members of our society who are denied the service delivery that the people's money is intended to pay for. 

Last week, the Auditor-General expressed his concern that government and public servants are weakening the pillars of governance protecting South Africa's democracy and that his office is vulnerable because of lack of support from government. My experience of the Auditor-General is that he is not an alarmist and that his timely warning should be taken seriously by the executive. In your performance monitoring and evaluation, Minister, how do you rate executive support for the Auditor-General?

Government has no money of its own, it all belongs to the people and the executive must spend it wisely in the delivery of service to the people. 

If it continues to fail them, the people's voices will be heard, no matter how hard the ANC and its alliance partner COSATU tries to silence them.

Issued by the DA, May 16 2012

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