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Article by Sisa Sityata-Soga
While the Eastern Cape Department of Education’s financial status remains on the negative, Acting Superintendent General, Professor Harry Nengwekhulu projects three more years as necessary to turnaround productivity and efficient use of the department’s resources.
Taking into consideration the past financial years’ successive negative reports by the Auditor General, Nengwekhulu cited a long-term under-funding and an over-concentration of available funding between administrative and personnel duties as the main factors.
Nengwekhulu was adamant that the reduction in potentially wasteful expenditure or spending that is not in line with a measured and efficient outcome would continue to be monitored and will not be accepted.
“Our personnel budget is lower than other provinces now [and] if we kept on buying equipments and providing catering and so forth, without belt tightening we would have overspent profusely”, he said.
With recent upheavals on power cuts at schools which occasionally affected the head office, Nengwekhulu said the Eastern Cape “is the only province that has schools that do not budget in the whole country”.
He added that “lack of budgeting and accounting” knowledge by managers has been the major challenge and contributed immensely to the current financial crises and before.
According to him the department has introduced limited spending on the buying of unnecessary equipment, entertainment (including internal catering), travelling and hotel accommodation.
“As a short term solution, shifting of funds from slow performing programs and sub-programs to those on the frontline of service delivery where more results are expected would continue to be a priority. This is done to ensure that there is efficient use of resources to deliver better value for money”, concluded Nengwekhulu.
Article Tags: projects, belt tightening
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