The Eastern Cape education department has overspent its budget by more than R600-million, the province’s education minister Mkhangeli Matomela told MPs on Tuesday.
Briefing Parliament’s education select committee, he warned the overspending would lead, among other things, to cutting the number of schools the region had planned to build this year.
Matomela said the overspending had been going on since 2000, and had grown from R109-million in that year to R602-million.
”Since 2000, it has been going up. It has never stopped; why as government… we did not deal with this matter, I really don’t know,” he said.
The department had overspent by R256-million in the 2001/02 financial year, and the figure had grown to R582-million in the next.
However, ”next year we will be sketching a good picture” Matomela said, adding he was currently talking to his department’s ”stakeholders” to sort out the problem.
When he had taken over as provincial education minister after the elections earlier this year, his department had paid R7-million in interest on its overdraft for two months only — April and May.
”You can’t have a situation where, in two months, you pay R7-million. To me that indicates poor management of the budget, and I hope this time around we are going to manage the situation properly.”
Referring to the overdraft, Matomela said the Treasury has refused to ”bail out” the department, and it would therefore have to delay some of its targeted projects to finance the loan.
”When I say some, I include even building of schools. I said we are going to build 64 schools this year, so we are going to cut that number by those we have not yet started.”
He did not give a figure on the number to be cut, but said it would have a negative impact on the department’s plan to ensure teaching was carried out on properly-built premises, and not in mud houses or under trees. – Sapa