Salary bill: president urged to act decisively
PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa will have to act decisively in dealing with the bloated public service, says economist Bonke Dumisa.
He said Finance Minister Tito Mboweni had no power to use his mid-term budget speech to dictate to the government how it should reduce its staff, or how Ramaphosa should trim his huge cabinet.
Delivering his maiden Medium-Term Budget speech, Mboweni said about 85% of the increase in the wage bill was as a result of higher wages, rather than headcount increases.
He said the National Treasury would not allocate additional money to meet wage agreements, which had “exceeded budgeted baselines by about R30.2 billion”. He said that the salary bill was unsustainable.
“At least he has put it in the public domain that we have an unsustainable wage bill,” said Dumisa.
Mboweni had said departments would have to deal with salary costs “within their own baseline”.
However, Sadtu, Cosatu and the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) interpreted Mboweni’s statement as an attack on government workers.
Saftu spokesperson Patric Craven said Mboweni’s statement meant that the salary budget allocated in February would “remain exactly as it was”.
“This can either lead to retrenchments, or cuts in their (departments’) services, which we will be opposed to.
“Definitely there would be protests, as we have already agreed in principle that there will be a three-day national stoppage on all these issues, such as unemployment, poverty and austerity,” Craven said.
He said that a date for the threeday national protest was yet to be decided, “but we will be announcing it shortly”.
Sadtu deputy general secretary Nkosinathi Dolopi accused Mboweni of punishing lower-level public servants for wastage done by senior government officials.
“We cannot fold our arms when there is a campaign to reduce the number of lower-level public servants. Ordinary public servants are not the cause of the bloated structure. We have too many ministers and their deputies.
“Too many perks, including cars, two offices – one in Cape Town and another one in Pretoria. Directors-general and deputy directors-general are earning a lot of money,” he said.
Cosatu said it was not workers who caused the fiscal crisis. “Government does not have a coherent plan of reducing the ballooning Cabinet headcount. We do not hear the government talking about imposing a freeze on salaries of state-owned enterprise CEOs and management. We hear nothing about how they will reduce the massive wage gap in the public sector,” it said.
This can either lead to retrenchments or cuts in their services, all of which we will be opposed to Patrick Craven Saftu spokesperson