Speaking at the opening of Parliament, in Cape Town, Mbeki said the focus of government’s social investment would mainly be on the nodal points identified by country’s Urban Renewal and Rural Development Programmes.
“It is in these areas that we find the largest concentration of the marginalised sections of our population, which require dedicated interventions to extricate them from conditions of underdevelopment and entrenched poverty,” said Mbeki.
“This dictates that we focus on them with regard to our social spending, as well as social and economic infrastructure investment”.
Mbeki said that this would ensure that government draws significant numbers of the unemployed into productive work, and that these workers gained skills while they worked.
“Further improvement in the quality of the lives of our people also requires that we take new measures to increase the volume and quality of our investment in the social infrastructure. This includes such areas as housing and municipal infrastructure, hospitals and clinics, schools, roads, water, electricity and government facilities,” he added.
“In all these areas, we must improve our performance relative to the previous year”.
He stated that additional resources would be set aside to meet this obligation and government would ensure that these resources are actually used to have necessary mechanisms to implement policies and decisions.
Mbeki praised the provinces for significantly improving efficiency in the area of capital investment, saying that during a period of nine months of the current fiscal year, expenditure in this area has increased by 48%, compared to the same period during the previous fiscal year.
“At the same time, it seems clear that not all the allocated funds will be spent by the end of the financial year. It is precisely this shortcoming that we must address this year,” he said.
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