Future funding allocations will become tougher for national departments, says Treasury

CAPE TOWN - The National Treasury has said that it will become tougher on national departments in how it allocates funding in future, and they can no longer expect their budgets to naturally increase year-on-year.

As the fiscus prepares for the next budget cycle and with the hindsight of this year’s delays due to political contestation, it invited the public to make input on the budgeting process on Friday.

As the reality of sluggish economic growth bites, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said the country can’t borrow limitless amounts of money to fund everyone’s budgetary desires.

This year, the government will have to pay back R171 billion in debt, which excludes its arrangement with Eskom, while still needing to borrow R588 billion to fund current expenditure.

Chief director at the National Treasury, Marumo Maake, said expenditure must be reined in and departments can’t expect years of incremental budgeting to continue.

"The engagements we are currently having with the departments is to identify priority areas. Everything is a priority, we understand. But in an environment where the resources are constrained, you are going to have to identify priorities within your priority list,"said Maake.

Maake said the National Treasury has always come under flak for the way it seeks to control expenditure, but it wants to move towards identifying the strongest expenditure priorities.

"What we normally used to call hairline cuts has never worked because hairline cuts tend to just treat each priority as if they are the same," he added.

Maake also said that the National Treasury hopes its spending reviews will identify the country’s most pressing priorities and weed out underperforming programmes where savings can be made.