It's not the bucks, it's delivery that's needed, Trevor!

Those failures in spending cost us badly and perhaps budgets need to be more closely aligned to agencies to facilitate delivery, instead of millions getting rolled over each year and public protests rising because public sector managers don't know how to project manage.

Rolled over

Some municipalities rolled over half of their capital expenditure budgets last year - this has led to challenges in everything from road maintenance to water purity.

We need to unite to enhance skills to ensure delivery and ensure our economy does not collapse as others are. Training budgets need to rise, not be cut. Already GDP is projected to drop to 1.2% this year after averaging 5% of for the past four years. Infrastructure spend will rise to R787 million - but social grants will get R12 billion more - there is a dangerous gap between job creation and becoming a welfare state.

The challenge for Manuel is not in setting appropriate budgets; Government does that, but not enough of its managers, especially at local government level, have the capacity to implement Government's vision of growth and development and in today's challenging global economic climate, implementation is critical. The economy grew faster, from 1999, than skills development, but a dramatic deceleration in growth needs to be matched by acceleration in skills training if we are not to face serious economic consequences.

In 2007/8, education spending exceeded R105 billion but in the same year half of all matriculants failed. Provinces have budgeted R18 billion to spend on schools and equipment 2007 - 2010. Revenue from the skills development levy is projected to grow to R9 billion by 2010/11.

Lagging

The money is there, but human capital development is lagging. Key bottlenecks in the public sector include leadership capacity especially project management skills. There are failures in managing public finances in areas such as revenue and expenditure management and much more needs to be done to enhance training of finance for non-financial managers.

More focused attention needs to be given to everything from educating non-financial managers in everything from drawing up a budget to reading a balance sheet and managing to petty cash to report writing, monitoring and evaluation. Human resources management skills need upgrading, in particular performance management and skills facilitation.

Manuel has delivered the most recent national budget and at the end of this month, Government departments end their financial years, but again too many will roll over significant amounts of money that could have been spent transforming SA's economy.

Junior and middle management

A greater focus needed to be applied to creating much-needed administrative and project management skills among junior and middle management in local authorities and at headmaster and head of department level at schools and educational institutions. A great teacher does not necessarily become a great manager. Education needs to be seen as a business operation. It is expensive to run a school nowadays with demands around textbooks, computer equipment, sophisticated technical and sporting needs and appropriately resourcing and rewarding teachers.

Our matric failure and university dropout rates are alarming and so too is the decline in numeracy. Educational staff at executive levels needs to be given the right sort of management tools to extend appropriate knowledge and skills to learners to ensure we start plugging skills gaps and employing more people. It was alarming to hear President Kgalema Motlanthe note that not all children who finished school last year have yet received their grades - those sorts of failures prevent young people from gaining access to further study or work.

Attendance at university does not teach you how to work. StatsSA told us in 2004 that we had 60 000 unemployed graduates and by 2006 that figure had shot up to 250 000 unemployed graduates.

No country can afford such human resource wastage.