Question NW1080 to the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology

Reply:

DEPARTMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND TRAINING

(1) The Department did not receive official communication from National Treasury on the budget reductions. The Department is waiting for the announcement to be made by Parliament.

(2) Not applicable

DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND INNOVATION

(1) R1 759 479 000. This amount is made up of R1 435 304 000 budget cuts and R324 175 000 for COVID-19 initiatives.

(2) The reduction will not be spread evenly throughout the department.

2 (a) Programmes have different budgets for implementing different initiatives.

2b (i)

Budget cuts per programme

Programme	Compensation of employees R’000	Goods and services R’000	Transfers and subsidies R’000	Total R’000
Administration	18 995	22 987	-	41 982
Technology Innovation	5 769	9 978	50 000	65 747
International Cooperation and Resources	5 946	14 422	14 925	35 293
Research Development and Support	4 339	6 055	926 144	936 538
Socio-economic Innovation Partnerships	4 951	-	55 375	60 326
Total	40 000	53 442	1 046 444	1 139 886

Budget cuts per entity (Parliamentary Grants)

	R’000
Technology Innovation Agency	45 586
South African National Space Agency	18 209
National Research Foundation	96 610
Council for Science and Industrial Research	99 765
Academy of Science of South Africa	2 790
Human Science Research Council	32 459
Total	295 418

(ii) Principles

Programmes

• There is an anticipated savings on compensation of employees’ budget as the filling of vacancies will delay due to the pandemic.
• Savings to be realized from goods and services budget due to the lockdown, for example: Travel, events, etc.
• Various factors were considered under transfers and subsidies budget:
  • Projects that would not be feasible to implement due to the pandemic, for example: infrastructure, science awareness, etc.
  • Projects that were allocated funds during the last quarter of the financial year and the prospect of spending the new money (2020/21) were slim.
• There are however other areas where the cuts will have a negative impact, these include; the Human Capital Development. The department proposed these cuts in order to reach the 20% stipulated by National Treasury. These challenges were presented by the department to the National Treasury.

Entities

• 10% cut was proposed on the entities’ parliamentary grants across the board.
• A lesser percentage (as opposed to 20% requested by National Treasury) was proposed in order to minimize the impact of the cuts to entities.
• Entities are also expected to make some savings on areas where there will be no or minimal activities during the lockdown.
• Based on the above, the department is satisfied that the proposal is fair, however it was noted that entities which rely on external revenue might be negatively impacted as the revenue has declined substantially due to the prevailing conditions.
• The department has discussed the entities that are affected by decline of external revenue with the National Treasury for possible amnesty.