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APPROPRIATION BILL 2024/25: INPUT SOUGHT AT EXCEPTIONALLY SHORT NOTICE
- 12 July 2024
- Parliament
- SA Legal Academy
Please note: On 17 July 2024, the NCOP Committee on Appropriations issued a notice giving stakeholders two days to make written submissions on the Appropriation Bill – which has yet to be passed by the National Assembly. A final round of public hearings is scheduled to be conducted five days later.
The standard parliamentary notice routinely published each year to elicit public comments on the latest Appropriation Bill has announced – at exceptionally short notice – that public hearings on the revived 2024/25 Appropriation Bill will take place on 19 July 2024. In anticipation of this, input is sought by 18 July: giving stakeholders a mere six days to prepare written submissions.
During a recent meeting of the National Assembly’s Trade, Industry & Competition Committee, Deputy Minister Zuko Godlimpi explained why the Bill provides for national departmental appropriations rather worryingly informed by outdated strategic plans about to be reviewed and substantively changed.
Simply put, national departments and their entities need the allocations concerned to continue functioning. How the 2024/25 appropriations are used will be the focus of the next round of strategic plans – underpinned by policy proposals expected to be discussed during the upcoming Cabinet lekgotla.
Meanwhile, in the National Assembly committees to which they have been deployed, new MPs are being presented with 2024/25 annual performance plans mostly recording dismal performances but nevertheless proposing that business should continue as usual. Thankfully, Trade, Industry & Competition Deputy Minister Zuko Godlimpi made it abundantly clear that this is definitely not what the Government of National Unity has in mind – at least for his department.
One cannot help but wonder how many other National Assembly committee members have been given similarly encouraging assurances.
Whatever the case, it would have been helpful if the National Assembly Appropriations Committee secretariat had taken the trouble to draw attention to this in its notice calling for public comment on the Bill. Tabled in February with the 2024/25 Budget, it was one of the pieces of proposed new legislation left to lapse when Parliament rose for the May elections.
As Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) records clearly indicate, last year the 2022/23 Appropriation Bill was processed between 3 and 30 May – with a report tabled in the House early the following month. Because Parliament rose at the end of March for the May elections, this was not possible.
- committee notice
- Bill
- PMG records on 2023/24 Bill
- PMG records on 2024/25 Bill
Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch