Vulekamali empowers South Africans 

More Matshediso

With a click of a button, people are able to easily get to grips with the country’s budg-ets, thanks to an online system called Vulekamali.The portal was established two years ago by National Treasury in collaboration with a number of civil society organ-isations. This innovative project won an award during the 17th Pub-lic Sector Innovation Awards 2019, under the Innovations Harnessing 4IR Solutions cat-egory. National Treasury Director Andile Best, who leads the Vulekamali portal initiative,  says its main aim is to increase public interest, participation and knowledge of govern-ment’s financial programmes.“This is National Treasury’s commitment to be more trans-parent about public finances. Budgetary information is already published on Treas-ury’s website, but the portal contains easily accessible data in a user-friendly format, to enable more effective infor-mation sharing, analyses and research,” he explaines.  According to Best, Vulekamali supports involvement by civil society and the public in budget processes and enables citizens to have informed discussions about government policies.“If we ask the public to partic-ipate in budgetary processes and they come from a position of not knowing, they cannot make quality inputs. Secondly, we want the public to know how government spends mon-ey from the public purse,” Best says. For example, civil society organisations often want to know how government renders services, how services are connected to the budget and whether national, provincial or local government is responsible for specific services.Best says amongst the stake-holders involved in the project are the Department of Plan-ning, Monitoring and Evalu-ation; civil society coalition Imali Yethu; Global Initiative and the Government Technical Advisory Centre. At every level of decision making and on each govern-ance structure, there is rep-resentation of both government and civil society, he says.Speaking on behalf of the civil society organisations involved, Zukiswa Kota, the head of the Monitoring and Advocacy Pro-gramme at the Public Service Accountability Mon-itor and lead co-ordinator of Imali Yethu, says accountable budgetary processes are critical to a democracy. The ultimate goal is to influence better ser-vice delivery, she says.“For us, access to quicker information means that you do not constantly have com-munities upset and unaware of budget processes,” she says, adding that people have a better sense of the urgency required in commenting on budgets and they know who to speak to about their frustrations.More MatshedisoRhino poaching in South Africa has declined from 768 rhino killed for their horn in 2018 to 594 in 2019. This is according to Minister of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries Barbara Creecy. She says the decrease is the re-sult of additional steps taken by government to curb poaching and paid tribute to the rangers who work tirelessly each day to stop poachers.Anti-poaching measures implemented by government include improved capabilities to react to poaching incidents through better situational awareness and use of tech-nology, improved information collection and sharing amongst law enforcement authorities, better regional and national co-operation and more mean-ingful involvement of the pri-vate sector, non-governmental organisations and donors.“A decline in poaching for five consecutive years is a reflection of the diligent work of the men and women who put their lives on the line daily to combat rhino poaching, often coming into direct contact with ruthless poachers,” says the minister.  She says that steps to address rhino poaching and wildlife crime across the country are aligned with the Integrated Strategic Management of Rhinoceros plan and with the principles set out in the draft National Integrated Strategy to Combat Wildlife Trafficking (NISCWT), which will be taken to Cabinet for consideration in the first half of this year.  The NISCWT aims to strengthen the law enforcement aspects of the Integrated Strate-gic Management of Rhinoceros plan and broadens the scope to combat other wildlife traffick-ing, not only rhino poaching.With regard to elephant poaching, the department says 31 elephant were poached in South Africa in 2019, of which 30 were from the Kruger Na-tional Park and one was from Mapungubwe National Park. This is a far cry from the 71 poached in 2018.From January to December 2019, 178 suspected poachers were arrested in the Kruger National Park. Nationally, 332 suspects were arrested for rhino poaching and rhino horn trafficking.
 