Parliamentary House Chairperson Cedric Frolick says they are putting measures in place in an attempt to unblock what he describes as a glaring inefficiency when it comes to accessing millions of rands in flood relief from the government.
National Treasury revealed on Wednesday that it has not received any applications from government departments to access the R1 billion made available for flood relief to KwaZulu Natal and the Eastern Cape.
Frolic told Parliament's Ad Hoc Committee on Flood Disaster Relief and Recovery, which is currently on an oversight to the Eastern Cape, that they will now set up a meeting involving the Finance Minister and the various line-function departments, including Human Settlements and Transport, to ensure that these funds are freed up.
Frolick confirmed that Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana had not received ANY submissions for access to the different grants.
Ulrike Britton, who is the Chief Director of Urban Development Infrastructure at the National Treasury, told the Committee that the four grants sit on the budgets of the Departments of Human Settlements and Co-operative Governance.
"We have not received any requests from the transferring officers to release this money," she said.
"What we do know is that both Departments, as the national transferring officers, have received requests from provinces and municipalities to access these grants."
Britton explained that there are certain conditions that need to be met. These include these provinces and municipalities submitting disaster risk mitigation plans and producing proof of any insurance they might have.
"We can confirm that municipalities are telling us that they do have insurance for damaged infrastructure in some cases. However, we are picking up that in a lot of cases, municipalities are 'double-dipping'.
What this means is that although they do have insurance, they're choosing not to put in insurance claims or are not waiting for their insurance claims to be finalised before coming to request funds from these conditional grants."
