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.
This can either lead to retrenchments or cuts in their services, all of which we will be opposed to
Patrick Craven