May 2025 Budget: Key among the state’s reforms to improve spending and root out waste for the 2026 budget process is to upgrade data, IT and capital-budget systems to embed evidence-based decisions across government.
This will include identifying and removing ghost workers and tightening procurement rules, says National Treasury’s May 2025 budget overview document.
Finance minister Enoch Godongwana today delivered his budget speech at Cape Town City Hall, to tell the nation how government plans to fill the revenue shortfall and what programmes may be slashed to cut spending.
Today’s budget speech showcased revisions to the fiscal framework proposed in the March 2025 budget review.
According to Treasury, together with provincial treasuries, it assessed R312 billion in spending programmes since 2013, with many revealing shortcomings in policy costing, implementation and oversight that led to duplication and waste.
It adds that spending reviews identified R37.5 billion in savings that can be achieved from changes to operating models and improvements in oversight.
“To take these recommendations forward for the 2026 medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) period, the budget process will be redesigned to close low-priority or underperforming programmes, and achieve greater efficiency in procurement, ICT and infrastructure management.
“The process will also implement reforms flowing from the recent review of public employment programmes and active labour market programmes discussed in the 2024 MTBPS. That review found that while the portfolio is comprehensive, the effectiveness and efficiency of individual programmes is mixed.”
Treasury aims to implement a range of reforms to improve how infrastructure programmes and projects are planned, procured, contracted and implemented in provinces and municipalities.
In addition, it reveals government has begun a process to identify ghost workers and other payroll irregularities.
“Previous initiatives to uncover ghost workers relied on an inefficient census methodology. The new data-driven approach will integrate multiple administrative datasets, more easily detecting anomalies across national and provincial departments.”
Treasury notes that changes to improve the budget process will be implemented over time, with further updates to be provided in the 2025 medium-term budget policy statement.
In his speech, Godongwana also stated that going forward, underperforming programmes will be closed as the 2026 MTEF budget process undergoes redesign.
“New reforms will target infrastructure planning and implementation across provinces and municipalities. A data-driven approach to detecting payroll irregularities will replace the more costly method of using censuses.
“This initiative will cross-reference administrative datasets to identify ghost workers and other anomalies across government departments. Part of the goal of these initiatives is to also remove the regulatory burden on business.”
A 2023/24 Public Service Commission study, presented to the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration in Parliament last week, uncovered that human resource management practices and processes in some state departments are fragmented and lack digital solutions.
The study, which sampled six national departments and several departments in five provincial administrations, uncovered that for some of them, going the manual route for leave forms, recruitment and selection was still the way to do things.
South Africa’s public service accounts for 1.3 million of the country’s labour force.
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