The Budget for this fiscal year presented yesterday by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan has been generally well received except for a few quirks like subsidising SANRAL and leaving the toll road charge in place as well as increasing the fuel levy, while reducing income tax but increasing the tax on dividends. But generally commentators have been impressed with the emphasis on growth strategies, plans to tackle corruption and tender fraud as well as the realisation that management capacity has to be tackled and built.

He has managed to keep the budget deficit down to under 5%. Whilst there is a commitment to reduce the cost of business, would Pravin be so bold as to consider the DA’s budget proposals on private sector/government partnership to develop the economy?

The major concerns that come out of the budget are the following:

• The very mind boggling news that only 68% of last year’s budget was spent due to capacity constraints
• The fact that trillions are to be spent on infrastructure yet we have the admission that the State lacks the management and skills to implement these programmes as well as the huge corruption, cronyism and tender fraud taking place
• Will there be serious attempts to tackle the high `volatility among staff in the public sector’ as outlined by Professor Ivor Chipkin in his report `Beyond the Popular Discourse: Capacity Constraints in the Public Sector’ `that such volatility is the single greatest cause of the failure in state performance’, `that Government departments are meeting their equity targets by poaching staff from one another’. (Quoted by Amanda Visser in Business Day 31st January 2012)
• According to the above report by Professor Chipkin, managers in the public service increased from 24 000 in 1995 to more than 70 000 by 2001 yet `the increase in the proportion of managers has also been accompanied by high vacancy rates. There is generally such poor public service delivery; one has to ask what are all these managers managing?
• The huge increases allocated to the departments of Education, Police, Health and Social Services without any indication on how to deal with the fact that most of these ministries are dysfunctional or that many `ghosts’ are still collecting social grants?

A way forward has to be found. We will only make progress as a society when there is a consensus on this, when we are all reading from the same page. We lost a huge opportunity to do this during the Madiba years and the Reconstruction and Development Programme when everybody was willing to make a contribution to changing South Africa. This was destroyed by the introduction of GEAR and Thabo Mbeki’s arrogance!

Today more and more vested interests are emerging who protect their own turf and speak past each other, rather than to each other, no matter what the cost to society and the country, such as SADTU and their hold over education, COSATU on labour broking, and the Government on the Constitution, the Protection of Information Bill and the President and Mulder on the land question!

Colin Smuts
Executive Director
CBDP