Mpumalanga’s poor budgeting and project mismanagement caused the government to miss its 10 000 job target, with irregular spending soaring to R11 billion in 2023-24.
The Mpumalanga government has failed to complete many infrastructure projects due to poor budgeting planning, according to the auditor-general’s (AG) recent report.
The identified backlogs led to the provincial government not creating jobs in the 2023-24 financial year.
The report released by auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke’s office recently said: “The departments are prioritising many projects with limited budgets, leading to significant project delays and abandonment.
Job creation targets not achieved
“Because of poor budgeting, more than 10 000 job creation targets were not achieved in the past financial year due to delayed and halted projects,” Maluleke said in the report.
The AG further highlighted that within different departments, there was a significant increase in unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure compared to the previous financial year.
ALSO READ: Remote Work Visitor Visa: Home Affairs introduces reforms to boost economic growth
Her recommendations included that government improve planning to ensure adequate funding for infrastructure projects is set aside for the duration of a project.
She also called on project managers to include outcome measures to enable consequence management when required outputs are not achieved.
According to her report, irregular expenditure in the province skyrocketed from R10.36 billion in 2022-2023 to more than R11 billion in 2023-2024.
Irregular expenditure skyrocketed to R11bn
It stated that fruitless and wasteful expenditure, which was R49.90 million in the previous financial year, has ballooned to R68.82 million in the current financial year.
Unauthorised expenditure moved from R0.97 billion in the 2022-2023 financial year to R1.05 billion.
ALSO READ: Premier Ramathuba signs strict job creation agreement with MECs
Political analysts said the backlog was caused by incompetence which was rife in government.
Thabang Motswaledi, from the department of politics at North-West University, said: “The hiring of incompetent people who will fail to do their job properly in government departments could be the cause, or contribute to, the Mpumalanga government’s problem.
“Corruption leads to the hiring of incompetent contractors while they do not have the capacity to do the jobs adequately.”
‘Incompetent people’ in critical positions
Political analyst Goodenough Mashego agreed with Motswaledi on the issue of placing incompetent people in critical positions.
He said the government employees were willing to do their jobs but failed because they didn’t qualify to occupy such positions.
ALSO READ: SA business leaders call for more digital skills programmes to boost youth employment
“Make no mistake, these people are willing to do the right things but do not know how. The question is not why they are failing but how they were employed in the first place.”
Mashego said the only way to deal with this was to address the problem of cadre deployment.
DA member of the Mpumalanga provincial legislature Bosman Grobler said the opportunity that government missed to create jobs “could have made a significant dent on the high unemployment rate in the province.”
Mpumalanga could have made dent in unemployment
“Mpumalanga has a 48.7% expanded unemployment rate, which includes 46.4% youth unemployment, one of the highest in the country.”
Mpumalanga provincial government spokesperson George Mthethwa had not responded to questions by the time of going to press.
ALSO READ: Game meat takes centre stage at Bela Bela abattoir
