KZN Public Works slashes wasteful expenditure to zero, invests R20m to go paperless

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Public Works and Infrastructure (DPWI) has pulled off a dramatic financial turnaround, cutting its historically bloated unauthorised, fruitless and wasteful expenditure to zero for the 2025/6 financial year. The second-smallest provincial department by budget allocation is leveraging its savings to bankroll a R20 million digital overhaul aimed at eradicating paper-based bureaucracy, stamping out tender corruption and multiplying productivity in the next three years. The department, which buckled under hundreds of millions of rand in rampant overspending, has tightly shut the fiscal taps.

“Previously this department had R731m in unauthorised expenditure (mostly on goods and services). We’ve cut that to almost zero,” KZN Public Works and Infrastructure MEC Martin Meyer said on Monday. “We are the only department that has almost zero in unauthorised expenditure and we’ve done that for two years.

We don’t overspend on our budgets anymore. We have become a much more efficient department when it comes to the management of our finances,” he said. Meyer was speaking during a media briefing at the KZN DPWI Technology & Innovation Summit, which drew about 400 delegates, including chief financial officers and other senior officials from government departments and the private sector.

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He announced at the summit that the department is partnering with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to launch a real-time infrastructure dashboard to manage projects. The tool allowed executives to monitor construction project statuses continuously, pinpoint bottlenecks early and base management decisions on live evidence rather than outdated reports. Meyer said the department had allocated R20m in its current budget specifically for the digitalisation of its operations.

The goal was to be paperless in three years. Mayer acknowledged that “R20m might not, in the bigger scheme of things, sound like a lot” but it represented a significant commitment given that the department operated on a budget of about R2.4 billion. Meyer said electronic submissions would prevent physical documents from being tampered with.

“One of the old tricks of making sure someone doesn’t give a tender is when those documents …. come, page 18 is suddenly missing … and then we have to discard the (incomplete) tender. If this whole thing happens electronically, no one can make page 18 go missing,” he said.

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