Everyone else is making Covid sacrifices, and so should the bureaucrats

As expected, finance minister Tito Mboweni delivered a sobering supplementary budget on Wednesday. If the numbers were bad in February, they are worse now. The economy will contract 7.2%, as per National Treasury estimations. The revenue shortfall is a staggering R300bn, pushing the budget deficit for this fiscal year to 15.7%. Debt is expected to reach 87.4% of GDP in 2024, after hitting 81.8% in 2020, up from just over 65.6% predicted in February 2020. In every R1 South Africans pay in tax, 21c goes to pay the interest on past debt. Debt service costs stand at R236.4bn, up from R229.3bn just four months ago, and R184bn in 2018. They exceed our health spending.

Savings of R230bn must be found over the next two years, and tax proposals to generate about R40bn over the next four years are expected in the 2021 February budget.

Mboweni is confident that he can rescue the country from this debt dark hole, but it is going to require major sacrifices from all of us. There could, however, be a silver lining to the coronavirus cloud. The National Treasury is enforcing a zero-based budgeting policy that will compel bureaucrats to explain the rationale behind each programme that needs funding, and motivate why it is essential. “Programmes that have very little impact on economic performance or service delivery will be phased out,” the Treasury warned.

Perhaps, finally, there might be a realisation that the government does not have an unlimited supply of cash and what it has must be spent in a prudent manner. Successive finance ministers have tried implementing austerity measures to trim the fat, but departments have either defied these or found ways around them.

As the coronavirus pandemic put the world in lockdown, we had to adjust to the new reality, including in the way we work. Video conferencing suddenly became the norm and eliminated the need to physically meet colleagues. The state spends billions each year paying for government officials to shuttle between Pretoria and Cape Town in supporting roles to their political principals or directors-general. For each official who travels, the cost to the state includes return flights, hotel accommodation, car hire and spending money. If departments were to substantially trim the size of the delegations that make the weekly trip when parliament is in session, the savings would be substantial. Also, isn’t it time we revisited the debate about moving parliament to Gauteng to save costs?

There are other areas where the state could make immediate savings. The lockdown has shown that we don’t need many of the conferences and conventions that bureaucrats are so fond of. These can be reduced to only essential ones, and many of the delegates can simply connect via video-conferencing from wherever they are, eliminating the need for travel and accommodation.

In his February budget, Mboweni identified R160bn in savings that could be made from the public sector wage bill. A huge chunk of this was in renegotiating the three-year wage agreement signed with public-sector unions, and possibly reducing the aboveinflation percentage increase for public servants in the third and final year of the agreement. The unions saw red and are taking the government to court for breaching the agreement.

But they and their millions of public-sector members have to accept these sacrifices for the greater good of the country. As companies saw their revenue decline under the lockdown, many had to either retrench, not pay workers or ask them to take salary cuts. Government workers already have jobs for life and salaries guaranteed by the taxpayer. No-one is asking them to take a reduction on their overall remuneration; the request is for them to sacrifice part of their annual increase so that money can be redirected to other priority areas, such as education, health and Covid relief.

This is not an unreasonable request.

No-one is asking them to take a reduction on their overall remuneration