Asgisa to be 'closely tracked'

Cape Town - The R372bn to be spent by the South African government on infrastructure spending under its Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (Asgisa) initiative over the next three years would be very closely tracked by both the national treasury and at cabinet level, South African deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has pledged.

Mlambo-Ngcuka was addressing the media in Parliament on Monday to provide further details on Asgisa as outlined by President Thabo Mbeki in his state of the nation speech on Friday.

According to Mlambo-Ngcuka, the R372bn in infrastructure spending announced by Mbeki was not new, but rather had already been provided for in the treasury's 2005 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), with various project spending simply being consolidated under the ASGISA framework for the three-year budget.

The national treasury would implement a dedicated mechanism to track the projects included in ASGISA to ensure they were done on time and to avoid roll-overs, the deputy president said.

Cabinet would also be tracking much of what Asgisa was doing, and the government would also look at additional resources should all the funds run out, she promised.

There would be an additional R4.5bn budgeted over the new (2006) MTEF period for the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), which would fund an additional 63 000 people working on road maintenance, as well as about 100 000 more people in jobs averaging six months dedicated to road building, and the development of about 1 000 more small black contractors.

Asgisa is aimed at accelerating South Africa's economic growth to an average of 4.5% between 2005 and 2009, and to 6% between 2010 and 2014, with the ultimate aim of halving poverty and unemployment by 2014.