He said that, in certain cases, the price tags had shot up because of "the bells and whistles that got into the technical design", and that the national fiscus should not have to foot the bill for such examples.

"To a large extent, the host city must take responsibility for that," he told Engineering News Online after a media briefing in Pretoria.

"There are also costs around very shoddy project management," Moleketi added. "Instead of having a fixed-cost tender, we have an open-ended tender, where there are provisional sums that are a huge percentage of the total project costs."

He said that the host cities that were found to be responsible for cost escalations would have to pay for them, but that government would give them a window period to do so.

The State would be engaging with the Development Bank of Southern Africa to provide loans to make up the shortfall, but the guilty host cities would have to pay these back.

"What's important is to create a window period, where in terms of servicing those loans, the national fiscus takes responsibility over a period of time, but, ultimately, it will be the host city that takes responsibility for that loan," he said.

However, Moleketi acknowledged that not all cost overruns would be the cities' fault.

There are other things that are beyond their control, like the cost of steel, and to that extent, we will take the responsibility. But for avoidable cost escalations, government was engaging the relevant municipalities in "delicate discussions", and it was approaching these discussions on a case-by-case basis.

In November last year, Moleketi had already warned of stadium and associated infrastructure cost overruns, pegging them at between R2,8-billion to R3,4-billion.

He said, at the time, that government was going to interrogate projections for "each and every item that goes into building the infrastructure".

Some 60% of the projected spend at some World Cup stadiums was based on "provisional sums", which meant that they had actually not yet been quantified, Moleketi commented, adding that government needed to "tie down" these contracts.

Moleketi was speaking at the Union Buildings in his capacity as chairperson of government's 2010 Technical Coordinating Committee.