KwaZulu-Natal Finance MEC Francois Rodgers told business representatives that he would rather be unpopular than succumb to government departments' requests for additional funding, which ends up being spent unnecessarily “on nice to have”.

On Wednesday, the DA provincial leader addressed captains of industry following his R158 billion budget speech, which he delivered in Pietermaritzburg on Tuesday.

Sanlam organised the event that took place in Durban to allow business representatives to engage the MEC on his budget. eThekwini Mayor Cyril Xaba also attended the event.

“Can we get a cartoonist to do a character of me with a big rubber stamp that says ‘no’, because that is mainly my response to any request for additional funding unless it is followed by due process?

“That does not go down well, but I must also say that I have been told that any finance MEC who is popular is not doing the job. So, I should remain unpopular,” said Rodgers.

He said he was labeled “an MEC who stole Christmas” after he told the departments that the employees should pay for their own Christmas parties “as there are no Christmas parties being funded”.

In his effort to reduce wasteful spending, Rodgers told the legislature on Tuesday that the provincial government would have to do away with hiring cars for the staff.

This was because the R158 billion might look like an enormous budget, but with the reality of the battling economy and the skyrocketing unemployment rate, the money is too small to be wasted.

“Having taken over eight months ago, one of the things I started was to look at fiscal discipline in terms of legislation.

“It is a problem [that] we have technocrats, administrators, and politicians who believe that the money that they are allocated is for their benefit and not for the benefit of the people,” he said.

He said his first task in the office was to deal with over-expenditure on luxury items like vehicle leasing, hotel accommodation, and “all of those nice to have.”

“We had an appetite to change, but I am saddened to say that it is not the change that we wanted.

“That is the task that I am prepared to take and I have the premier's (Thami Ntuli) full support in being the champion of us ensuring that every single Rand that we spend goes towards our main priority, which is building a capable and ethical state, dealing with poverty, inequality and job creation.

“When I came into the treasury, that is the one thing (wasting money) that I said we cannot do any longer because of the fiscal constraints that currently we have,” said Rodgers.

He said education, health and social welfare, which are referred to as frontline departments, have a big chunk of their budget spent on the salaries of their employees.

“How do you spread those [financial] resources when you have frontline departments who are projecting to overspend?

“Their projection (for over-expenditure) when I took over was R10 billion, and we managed to reduce that to below R5 billion, and we will continue on that trajectory,” he said.

The provinces had, in the past couple of years, been struggling to recover from the aftermath of the Covid-19, 2021 civil unrest, recurring floods, and a weak economy that led to the national government cutting down allocation to the province.

Cutting down allocation to provinces was meant to help the national government to be able to repay its debts.

“We borrowed an enormous amount of money and we now pay 22 cents in a rand for revenue generation national on debts and therefore we as the province had to take enormous cuts,” he said.

He said over four years, from the provincial equitable share, which was the money allocated from the national government to the province, an amount of R60 billion had to be cut, “which is an enormous amount of money.”

“If you in your household are earning R10 000 and you have to cut it down to R5 000 a month, it is very difficult to come out of that situation.

“So those R60 billion budget cuts in KZN were top slice for all of our departments,” he said.

However, he said that although coming out of the situation was extremely difficult, it was not impossible, but that would require extreme discipline.

He was relieved that the national government had allocated additional funds in the form of equitable shares and conditional grants to the province for the first time in four years.

“That is the first time that there are no budget cuts; we need to work extremely carefully with the additional money that has been allocated to us,” said Rodgers.

bongani.hans@inl.co.za