Finance MEC demands budget discipline

Finance MEC Francois Rodgers told business rep resentatives that he would rationalise KZN’s expenditure, establish a government departments’ requests for addi tional funding which ends up being spent unnecessarily on Tuesday.

- BONGANI HANS and MTHOBISI NOZULELA

The DA provincial leader addressed captains of industry at Sanlam’s post budget response in Durban yesterday. He restated his R143.8-billion provin cial budget speech in Pietermaritzburg on Tuesday.

eThekwini Mayor Cyril Xaba also attended the event.

“Can we get a cartoonist to do a character with a 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 a finance MEC who is popular is not doing the job. So, I should remain unpopular,” said Rodgers.

He said he was labelled “an MEC who stole Christmas” after he killed 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 gov ernment 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 unem ployment rate, the money was too less to be wasted.