Johannesburg - None of the departments in the Gauteng Provincial Government are under any provincial administration from the national government.
Premier Nomvula Mokonyane stressed this message on Tuesday following reports in the media that alleged that some departments in the province were to be controlled by the national government under Section 100 of the Constitution.
Some of the reports had misinterpreted the national GCIS' statement sent out yesterday which said the national government would be intervening in the Free State, Limpopo and Gauteng provinces.
The GCIS statements read as follows:
"...Gauteng and Free State provinces requested assistance from the National Treasury. Gauteng requested assistance to address the challenges in the Health Department while the Free State identified Financial Management and non-compliance to Supply Chain Management processes in their Police, Roads and Transport Department as issues that needed urgent attention."
Mokonyane said Gauteng welcomed the national Treasury's interventions.
"I am relieved that the national department has come on board to resolve the problem of the financial mismanagement of the department of health, which has been an embarrassment to us," she said.
According to the Gauteng Provincial Government, processes to correct the deficiencies in the Health and Social Development Department were underway and the province had only sought National Treasury assistance to address their supply chain management and financial controls.
"We as the provincial government went public and acknowledged that certain things are not going as smooth as they are supposed to be. We said it as far back as the opening of the legislature in February and recently when we tabled our political report," she said.
"It is no secret that the health arm of the department has been plagued by financial management and procurement issues as far back as 2005. As a pro-active administration that is concerned with clean governance, we took a number of corrective steps to remedy the situation - approaching National Treasury for guidance being one of them," she said.
A number of interventions had already been taken to steer the situation in the right direction, she told reporters at Number 30 Simmonds Street on Tuesday.
"These include decentralising the procurement of certain essential goods and services and giving hospital CEOs powers to control some of their budgets from the hospital level," she said.
This, the premier added, will greatly improve the current situation where suppliers' invoices are submitted at hospitals, then sent to the department and then finally get to the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC), which provides administrative services for all the province's departments, to be paid.
In addition, the premier said essential services would be moved away from the GSSC back to departments where they would be paid immediately.
Mokonyane said they had also instituted a dedicated team comprising the Office of the Premier and the Department of Finance that will work jointly with the Department of Health and Social Development and the four tertiary hospitals in Gauteng to ensure that the hospitals were able to render services to the public.
She said the problem of in-migration into Gauteng was also bringing challenges to the budget of the province as it meant there was always going to be too much pressure on the services provided by hospitals.
Further, hospitals were owed millions by other provinces and departments such as Correctional Services, making it difficult to balance their books.
