Cape Town – Government has allocated an additional R239 million to municipalities, provinces and national departments to help repair infrastructure damaged after widespread flooding last year and earlier this year, the Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan has announced.
Presenting his Medium Term Budget Policy Statement in Parliament on Wednesday, Gordhan said the funding to repair RDP homes damaged in floods that struck Limpopo, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape last year and earlier this year was made available through several provincial sector grants and a new municipal disaster recovery grant.
For the 2013/14 financial year, R103 million has been allocated to provinces and R118 million for municipalities to repair infrastructure damaged by flooding, while the national departments will get an extra R18 million to repair damaged infrastructure.
A total of R1 billion has been added to provincial sector grants over the next three years, while R59 million has been allocated to municipalities affected by flooding, through the new municipal disaster recovery grant.
Other additional allocations announced by the minister include:
- R374 million to provide broadband internet in schools
- R150 million has been made available for the deployment of troops in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
- R57 million has been allocated to pay for contractual penalties incurred by Denel in the Airbus A400M contract
- R20 million for substance-abuse prevention
An extra R1 billion will be made available to cover the costs of inflation-related and other salary adjustments for public servants.
In addition, this R754 million will be rolled over from unspent balances in 2012/13, while a total of R3 billion that will not be spent in 2013/14 has been declared as unspent funds by departments and will be returned to the fiscus.
A further R508 million will be refunded to departments for expenditure finance by departmental revenue paid into the National Revenue Fund.
In addition, an extra R170 million has been made available to cover the effect of rand depreciation in foreign currencies during the current year – when the currency fell from R8.79 to the dollar in January to over R10 to the dollar recently. – SAnews.gov.za
