Cape Town – No, KwaZulu-Natal did not get the biggest slice of the budget pie because Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and President Jacob Zuma originate from the province of sugar cane and bunny chows.
That was the message from Nene during the New Age post-budget briefing in Newlands in Cape Town on Thursday.
The province where Nkandla is based received the largest budget of all the provinces in terms of equitable share, according to Nene's 2015/16 budget tabled in the National Assembly on Wednesday.
When asked by a breakfast guest about this decision, Nene was amused: “Is there suspicion that I come from there?”
He explained that equitable calculations were made when allocating to provinces and that there was no bias whatsoever.
In terms of how those provinces spend their budget, Nene cautioned: “We want to encourage people to plan properly, efficiently and effectively.
“Some people think we should allocate the entire budget to Gauteng because it’s the financial centre, which I don’t think is right.”
KwaZulu-Natal would receive R82.2bn for 2015/16, followed by Gauteng with R73.4bn and the Eastern Cape with R54.3bn.
Limpopo would receive R45.3bn, the Western Cape R38.2bn, Mpumalanga R31bn and the North West R26.1bn.
The provinces with the lowest budgets were the Free State with R21.7bn and the Northern Cape with R10.1bn.
READ: KZN gets biggest budget transfer
Nene told the breakfast briefing that chances were that inflation would remain the same or slow down. “We will take that into account going forward,” he said.
“We have been given increases that are higher than inflation,” he said. “We are trying to protect that.”
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