ECDoE responds to article appeared in the Daily Dispatch
ECDoE responds to article appeared in the Daily Dispatch
A review of the Department’s In Year Monitoring report for March 2017 indicates that we spent R3.7Billion out of our total budget allocation of R30.9billion; that works out to just over 10%. The commitments were for:
1. R1.9billion for normal salaries referred to as Cost of Employees (CoE). This is the average monthly expenditure to cover all salaries of Departmental employees.
2. R678million went towards payments of learner and teacher support materials (stationery, textbooks, computers, etc). These are delivered in November and December, with final top-ups in January and February.
3. R103million went towards payments for school furniture delivered to schools at the beginning of the year.
It’s reasonable therefore that these financial obligation for services rendered at the end of the year and during the first 2 months are settled in March. There is definitely no fiscal dumping here as these payments were done with the approval of provincial Treasury when the Department requested permission to do an additional LTSM Corrective Order in order to overhaul availability of learning materials in all our schools.
The December expenditure spiked because it covered payments for 2 months (Nov & Dec) for Infrastrure Delivery, the total payment for the 2 months was R306million.