Scaling to Save Money, Make Money, and get our people Home for Dinner
Speech by Deidré Baartman
Western Cape Minister of Finance
Vote 3: Provincial Treasury Budget Speech
Western Cape Provincial Parliament
Cape Town
12 December 2025
“Scaling to Save Money, Make Money, and get our people Home for Dinner”
Honourable Speaker
Members of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament
- INTRODUCTION
Today, I present the 2025/26 Adjustment Budget for Vote 3: Provincial Treasury under a theme that speaks to the heart of our work; if we want our province to Scale for Growth, then as a Treasury we need to scale to save money, make money, and making it easier to get our people home for dinner.
This theme reflects the discipline, innovation, and efficiency that have come to define the work of the Treasury’s performance this year.
This adjustment comes at the end of a year in which the Treasury has had to keep a steady hand on the Province’s finances, despite national budget delays, rising input costs across the system, and the continued pressure of population growth. Even with this, we have worked hard to protect the services residents rely on and to strengthen the financial management capacity of the Western Cape Government.
- ACHIEVEMENTS
Despite national uncertainty, the Provincial Treasury stepped up, and without panic or uncertainty in the provincial system, delivered a 2025/26 Main Budget of R270 billion, not once but twice.
We launched the Western Cape Government’s Alternative and Blended Finance (ABF) Framework, which aims to crowd in additional financing over the medium term by leveraging partnerships with private investors, including impact investors, development finance institutions, multilateral development banks, and donor organisations; and we continue our collaboration with the National Treasury and the World Bank to establish a Blended Finance Risk Sharing Platform - a Credit Guarantee Vehicle (CGV) - which aims to mobilise private capital by de-risking critical projects in the energy, transport and water sectors.
In addition to this, the Treasury produced the 2025 Provincial Economic Review and Outlook and increased our virtual engagement with residents.
We will be publishing our second annual Local Government Budget Performance Overview next week, which gives insights into the financial health of our local governments.
Our 2024/25 Public Disclosure Report revealed a possible world-first milestone: 34% of all Western Cape Government procurement spend went to women-owned businesses, totalling R6.84 billion, having breached the National Treasury 30% benchmark for the first time in Western Cape Government history. Premier Winde and I have written to the UNDP, UN Women, and the World Bank to verify this achievement.
This comes amid our Constitutional Court challenge to the Public Procurement Act, which currently centralises procurement control with the National Finance Minister. The Western Cape is defending all provincial governments’ rights to design our own systems that drive economic growth and jobs. Our results show that our inclusive procurement model works without set-asides or mandatory sub-contracting, while delivering strong value-for-money outcomes. We did this not by excluding people from our economy, but by growing our pool of suppliers.
Treasury’s commitment to excellence is further reflected in its 12th consecutive clean audit; and auditing support to the province, as shown by the unqualified audits across all 14 provincial departments and 11 entities for the third year running. At municipal level, 26 municipalities received unqualified audit opinions, including 20 clean audits. These results show what disciplined financial management and good governance can achieve.
We supported departments in accessing Budget Facility for Infrastructure (BFI) and disaster funding, and successfully lobbied for data updates to the Provincial Equitable Share (PES) formula which affects the national transfer to our province.
We protected our reserves and diligently managed our cash (simultaneously gaining another clean audit for our Provincial Revenue Fund), and we have raised our own provincial revenue which now constitutes 6% of our full funding envelope.
Our expertise is now in demand nationally as well. We partnered with National Treasury to host the first-ever National Annual Financial Statements Consistency Workshop, aimed at strengthening municipal reporting across South Africa. And we continue our support of Theewaterskloof, Kannaland, and Beaufort West municipalities with their Financial Recovery Plans.
Honourable Speaker, our work does not end here. In order to save money, make money, and ensure our people get home for dinner, there is still a lot more work ahead of us.
- ADJUSTMENTS
The Provincial Treasury’s Main Appropriation of R359.755 million is now proposed as R334.421 million in the Adjustment Budget, a nett decrease of R25.334 million.
This is not a cut, but a technical realignment to the 2026 MTEF budget.
It consists of an increase of R1.247 million in rollovers -
- R742 000 rolled over from the 2024/25 financial year to settle outstanding payments for information and technology services delivered in March 2025 in order to modernise access to financial management data and strengthen our data analysis capabilities; and
- R505 000 rollover over from the 2024/25 financial year to settle outstanding payments for services rendered in February and March 2025 for analytical and technical support for our Supply Chain Management (SCM) data and information management strategy which assisted with enhancing our procurement insights across our province.
Further, we will adjust R26.581 million downwards, consisting of -
- Realigning R1.822 million to our 2026/27 financial year for 2 strategist posts, in order to develop and implement an institutional funding and change strategy;
- Shift R8.753 million from to the Department of the Premier to assist us in aligning our Provincial Treasury structure to our approved strategic plan and to facilitate job evaluation of posts at the Western Cape Gambling and Racing Board. This will support us in particular with our Alternative and Blended Finance, and Revenue Strategy work;
- Re-align R7.5 million to our 2026 MTEF to fund the appointment of expert support for the implementation of Alternative and Blended Finance framework, to advance our objectives in mobilising sustainable and scalable financing solutions;
- Shift R4.369 million to the Asset Finance Reserve to enable the future appointment of technical expert support from the infrastructure panel of experts;
- Re-align R3.745 million to our 2026 MTEF to fund the shortfall in the cost of the Microsoft Licenses allocated to the Department and additional licenses required;
- We will reallocate R215 000 to the 2026/27 financial year for our electronic Supply Chain Management (eSCM) integration and single sign-on for the Procurement Planning Toolkit, Western Cape Supplier Evidence Bank (WCSEB) and our electronic Procurement System (ePS); and
- We will reallocate R177 000 to the 2026/27 financial year for the March 2026 interdepartmental claim back from the Department of the Premier for the Municipal Standard Chart of Accounts (MSCOA) consultant.
- SCALING TO MAKE MONEY, SAVE MONEY AND GET OUR TEAM HOME FOR DINNER
Looking forward to the MTEF, we will now scale our ability to make money, save money and get our team home for dinner.
We will secure additional capacity to assist with legal, deal-making, risk and compliance, and procurement specialists in order to land on-balance sheet alternative and blended finance deals in our province, and support departments in leveraging off-balance sheet instruments like BFI, grant and donor funding.
We will modernise our eProcurement Solution (ePS) over the MTEF, fully digitising the end-to-end procurement process, from planning to payment.
And we will restructure our department in order to build a future-fit, revenue-focused Treasury, in order to support departments to accelerate delivery.
- CONCLUSION
Speaker, this budget reflects a department saving money through discipline and prudent decision-making, making money through innovation and partnerships, and organising ourselves so that our people can work well and still get home to their families in time for dinner.
It also shows a Provincial Treasury committed to fairness, innovation, trust and value for money. We apply those principles to ourselves before expecting them of anyone else.
I thank the Committee for their engagement; the Committee Chairperson, Mr Leon van Wyk for your insight; our Head of Treasury, Ms Julinda Gantana and all our teams in the Provincial Treasury for your professionalism and support; and to our Team Finance partners across national, provincial and local government spheres for your collaboration with us.
The work of a Treasury is often unseen, but its impact is felt in hospitals, classrooms, road networks, municipalities, and in every service the Western Cape delivers.
Honourable Speaker, for your consideration, I table the 2025/26 Adjustment Budget for Vote 3: Provincial Treasury.
I thank you.