Limpopo government likely to underspend infrastructure budget

Provincial Government is unlikely to utilise all the money budgeted for infrastructure development by the end of the 2019/20 financial year.

A report presented to the Executive Council (Exco) last Wednesday highlighted that the provincial cash flow projections expenditure by end of March was R5,722 billion or 94% of the total provincial infrastructure budget.

When tabling the 2019/20 budget in the Legislative chamber in March last year, former Provincial Treasury MEC Rob Tooley indicated that R16,9 billion was for various infrastructure investment categories. He stated that a budget of R1,2 billion or 7,1% was allocated towards new infrastructure mainly for construction of new clinics, libraries, schools, upgrading of gravel roads to tar, centres for place of safety and houses.

Tooley further highlighted that the estimated budget allocation for rehabilitation and refurbishment was R1,5 billion (8,9%), upgrading and additions of existing facilities was R3,3 billion (19,8%) and R6,2 billion (36,5) was for maintenance. It was reported that the Provincial Treasury apprised the Exco on interventions to improve the provincial infrastructure spending by the end of March as well as strategies to improve infrastructure planning and execution henceforth.

Provincial Treasury developed terms of reference and guidelines to assist departments to work a revised cash flow and interventions to improve spending by March, it was learnt.

Although Exco has noted improvement on paying service providers within the prescribed 30 days period, ten departments did not meet the required 100% as of December.

Premier Stan Mathabatha reportedly said it was encouraging that his office, Provincial Treasury, Department of Transport and the Department of Economic Development, Environment and Tourism were at 100% as of December.

It was reported that the overall provincial government performance is 95,37% and the Exco directed that failure to comply with the prescribed regulation should be met with appropriate consequence management measures as this has an adverse impact to companies doing business with government, especially small, medium and micro enterprises.