MBOMBELA – Newly-appointed MEC for Finance, Economic Development and Tourism, Mr Eric Kholwane urged managers to spend less time in meetings and more into working towards finding solutions to the Province’s challenges.
Kholwane was addressing the Senior Management Teams of the former Departments of Finance as well as Economic Development, Environment and Tourism last Friday. He said most of the solutions to major challenges of the province can be found in the collective of the officials who are entrusted with the responsibility of developing the economy and managing the provincial budget.
“We have a problem of unemployment in the country and the province as well. We must, therefore, dedicate most of our time to finding solutions to unemployment,” said Kholwane.
He is one of the newly-appointed Executive Members who were announced by Premier David Mabuza last Friday. He is the former Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Communication and brings a wealth of experience to the merged departments, which collectively have additional responsibility of providing information and communication technology solutions to other provincial departments in Mpumalanga.
In his role, Kholwane will also lead efforts of the Department in responding to the mandate of supporting other provincial institutions to improve the systems and processes that drive delivery and accountability for financial resources.
The Department is looking forward to the leadership of Kholwane in steering it to the desired level of service excellence, in executing responsibilities of overall provincial budget management, economic development and tourism and assisting other provincial departments and public entities to continue improving on areas of financial governance.
The new MEC for the merged departments is saying something that should have been implimented long ago, where you see administrators or public servants spend 80% of their employer’s time doing things that will not benefit the province. They will go to this trainings when its almost time for the new budget trying to exhaust the current funds instead of doing what they are employed to do which is service delivery. Its time they start earning for the service they provide than waste funds unnecessarly.