IT'S official. South Africa's national budget has reached the trillion rand mark. What does that mean and what are the implications for South Africans?

We have to understand that this huge amount announced by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan is not lying around waiting to be spent or misused.

In fact, despite the seemingly frightening digits, it pales into insignificance if we consider the needs of the country.

Some of it is derived from borrowing. The country has a budget deficit to sustain its spending requirements. This means that we are spending more than we generate revenue.

Some of it comes from our taxes. This means a great number of people - though dwindling as a result of unemployment - have worked hard to earn a living. In the process, they were taxed.

Given our pressing needs, we have to make sure the money is spent properly. With revenues dwindling and the economy in a sluggish mode - despite a few positive signs - it means every rand of the trillion has to be used effectively.

How that happens depends on how we as a society relate to our public representatives, who are responsible for sanctioning and monitoring the expenditure.

The president, his cabinet ministers, premiers, mayors, councillors and public administrators are responsible for spending the money on our behalf. It's not their property; it is public property.

How it is spent and who benefits from the expenditure is a matter of public interest. There needs to be transparency in the way public money is used.

The public must increasingly get involved in ensuring that there is value for all those trillion rands. We need renewed activism among citizens, who should demand answers when things don't go right. When , for example, a school collapses because the tender to build it was rigged, we must stand up.

Over the years we have been let down by a number of public representatives. MPs at the national and provincial levels have failed us dismally.

They have failed to ensure that their various executives spent money exclusively for the purposes for which it was allocated. The perennial stories of waste and fraud as told by the auditor-general are sickening. How long should we allow this to go on?

Part of the trillion rand allocation will be going to pay the salaries of parliamentarians. We urge them to at least, for a change, conduct themselves in a manner that serves the public, not their political bosses.

They must stop passing political sycophancy for executive oversight - lest we declare their salaries as fruitless expenditure.