South Africa: Cabinet Agrees to New Sip On Water and Sanitation

Pretoria — Cabinet, at its three-day Lekgotla this week, agreed to include a new Strategic Integrated Project (SIP) on water and sanitation as part of government’s infrastructure plan.

“The Lekgotla agreed to a new SIP on water and sanitation, aimed at addressing the country’s immediate and long-term water and sanitation needs,” the Minister in the Presidency Responsible for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Collins Chabane, said on Friday.

President Jacob Zuma in his State of the Nation Address earlier this year announced an infrastructure plan for the country. It lists 17 strategic integrated projects which cover a range of economic and social infrastructure projects across all nine provinces with emphasis on poorer regions.

The plan is intended to transform the economic landscape of South Africa, create a significant number of new jobs, strengthen the delivery of basic services and support the integration of African economies.

Cabinet established a body to integrate and coordinate the long term infrastructure build, namely the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission (PICC) with its supporting management structures.

Chabane said Cabinet had received a progress report from the PICC’s infrastructure build programme, across the 17 SIPs, at its meeting this week.

“Cabinet welcomed the steps taken to speed up construction and project sign off. Progress with spending as well as construction activities were tabled,” he said.

He said some inconsistencies in the costs of the various projects had been identified, such as some of the hospital projects, however the projects were continuing well.

“The Lekgotla welcomed the work done on cost-containment and measures to address and combat corruption in the infrastructure plan, which will now go through the Cabinet process in the next few months.”

He said Cabinet called on all spheres of government to strengthen implementation and enhance the localisation programme for components and supplies of infrastructure inputs.

“Projects that support regional integration will receive special attention,” added the minister.

The three-day, extended Cabinet meeting took place from 4 to 6 September at the Makgatho Presidential Guesthouse in Pretoria. The key objectives of the meeting were to assess progress on the various targets which government undertook to realize and achieve by 2014.