Health ministry under fire for overspending
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Monday May 30, 2022 06:00
A PAC member, Mephato Reatile, questioned why the ministry had spent so much money to an extent of overspending in expenses including P1.4 million on general expenses and supplies, P4.1 million on training and P184 million in summaries and allowance.
The expenses are all stated to be caused by arrears on allowance originating from a previous year. Reatlie also indicated that according to the report presented before the committee, medical fees and ARV drugs also contributed to the ministry’s overspending. But Muzila's response was that the P184 million overspending was caused by scarce skills allowance that they do not budget for. She explained that they were in talks with the Ministry of Finance that their scarce skills were up from 40% and 60% per officer. “There is need for budget because the vacancies were not enough to pay. We are always overspending because there are items that have not been budgeted for. We cannot ignore the scarce skills because we are talking about very significant expenditures.
If we don’t pay them, then we will have to stop some of the vital services. When you look at the previous years, you will realise that the ministry has been overspending, the main reason being allowance. We do budget but medicines price changes affect our budget,” she said. Moreover, Muzila said her ministry was concerned about wastage in her ministry. She explained that the past three years were disruptive and the situation is currently being addressed. She added that when COVID-19 hit the country, the ministry’s preparedness was a bit low. Muzila said some of the critical officers had to be taken for COVID-19 assistance that contributed to the disruptions. However, she pointed out that they recalled many of them and were getting back on track.
She further explained that when they started vaccination, they had people who wanted to vaccinate while others were not interested. At the time, she said the ministry did not have vaccines but had made payments and were still in talks with manufacturers. Muzila indicated that they got busy between years 2020 and 2021. They later managed to buy vaccines and vaccinated people. She said they spent a lot of time making efforts to combat COVID-19 adding that they made progress. “From February we started having another challenge where we had a lot of vaccines which ended up expiring.
We did not want government funds to be wasted. We made achievements there because we were amongst the top four African countries that achieved the 40% head immunity that was set by World Health Organisation (WHO) and now for the target of 70% we are sitting at 62% of people who are vaccinated. Looking at the population as a whole, that is commendable. We will continue vaccinations because vaccines are expiring. We have to be prepared because COVID-19 is still there and we might be hit by the fifth wave,” she said.