A question of priorities

[Dave A]

I saw something last Thursday that to me shows how screwed up some priorities are at the moment.

It was an AgriSETA briefing session, and representatives from other government organisations were given the opportunity to introduce themselves and their particular interest in the meeting. One of these was a representative from eThekwini Municipality who was driving an Expanded Public Works Development project.

The project concept sounds great - Train and set up people to carry out small scale farming in little parcels of land around the municipality producing vegetables for market. Real ground roots micro start-up stuff.

However, the reason she was there was to press the issue of getting funding from AgriSETA for the project, and there I have a problem. It's called road-renaming.

But maybe let's put the issue in perspective. It's a municipal project as part of the municipality's EPWP target. The relative budgets of eThekwini is absolute chalk and cheese. The total "votable" budget of AgriSETA is only a little over R30 million. That somehow has to serve the entire primary and secondary agriculture sector of the whole country. Perhaps someone can chip in with the votable budget of eThekwini municipality, but with Mike Sutcliffe's salary being what it is, I expect it is in the billions of Rands.

Now there was no room in the eThekwini budget for this project?
How much did the street renaming exercise cost?
And how many mouths did it feed?

[insulin]

56 million loss

First of I totally agree with you on the renaming of all public roads cities and so on. However, I want to bring in a second factor. As you may know Eskom although privatized to a degree it is still mainly a state owned company.

I have seen documentation that pointed out that Eskom is losing about 2 million a day thanks to the carelessness of the municipality. That is a staggering 56 million a month. Now that is a lot of money. Imagine how many lives can be changed with 56 million a month if spend on training, education and the health sector.

Sadly the money is used for nothing! That is right it is LOST because someone can’t do his or her job. To think that this is tolerated is beyond my reasoning. I honestly think the government must rethink their money problem and start to clean house.

Oh! And one more thing Eskom got a R6 billion that is 6 BILLION for improvement of systems in general and another 6 billion for new development programs. The thing is we! We the tax payer is giving this money to Eskom via the government. So I agree with you there is serious issues at hand.