The ANC in the Eastern Cape welcomes the progress registered by provincial government departments and entities in the audit outcomes of the previous financial year released by the Auditor General.
For a provincial government that comes from financial years where the AG couldn’t audit, formulate an audit opinion based on the poor integrity of financial statements and information submitted by auditees, the province is making a good progress.
At the heart of this progress is the fact that government departments, and municipalities, as we saw when the AG released their audit outcomes, are able to account for the use of public funds while at the same time driving service delivery development in the province.
The audit outcomes come at the time when government is working hard to address infrastructure backlogs in the province and as the ANC we strongly welcome this as it is in pursuit of our manifesto commitments we made to the electorate.
As government pursues these predetermined objectives through various programmers, it is important that we give procurement opportunities to companies from the Eastern Cape so that we improve the provincial economy.
Our infrastructure backlogs from decades of neglect and deliberate decision not to invest in the development of the provincial infrastructure, is one of the areas that can help us influence transformation of the provincial economy.
However, if the provincial government doesn’t give tenders to local companies, doesn’t empower these companies to better provide services to government, assists them to access business finance to be able to have financial capacity to meet government delivery timeframes, our economy will always watch the economies of other provinces grow.
The ANC calls on all its deployees to urgently address all matters raised by the AG in the report so that in the next audit we don’t still address issues of lack of internal controls, fruitless, wasteful and unauthorized expenditure because that suggests failure to be proper stewards of public resources.
We are more excited that there are entities and departments that were given clean audits by the AG and this proves to others that clean governance is not a concept that can only be marveled at presentations and meetings but it is a reality that has to be achieved daily through prudent operations and use of public resources used to develop this province to make the lives of our people better.
NB: This statement must be attributed to the ANC Provincial Secretary Oscar Mabuyane.
For more information please contact
ANC Eastern Cape Acting Communications
Officer Judy Ngoloyi on 073 117 6194.
Email: judy.ngoloyi@gmail.com
