Having underpaid budgets to provinces, Treasury must now intervene as frontline services face urgent crisis

Note to editors: Please find attached soundbites in English and Afrikaans by Willie Aucamp MP

The threat to teaching and other frontline service jobs due to severe underpayments of budgets has now come to the fore. Provinces like KwaZulu-Natal are at the greatest risk, with projections showing that as many as 11 000 teaching positions may be lost if urgent budgetary interventions are not made.

This funding crisis has largely been triggered by a centrally-agreed, and fiscally irresponsible, public wage increase in the October budget last year that is now forcing provinces to slash frontline service posts to the detriment of the most vulnerable.

The DA has long advocated for the protection of frontline services in the budget, and we urgently call on Treasury to intervene to avert these budget cuts by slashing wasteful expenditure in underperforming departments and focusing on economic growth and infrastructure development to create a more sustainable future.

We also call for an urgent reigning in of the state’s bloated wage bill by freezing the salaries of the public servants who are not covered by Occupation Specific Dispensation (OSD). This category includes managers, administrators and supervisors who are not of critical importance. In turn, this would enable the state to protect the wages of frontline workers by ensuring that the majority of public servants who are covered by OSD receive CPI inflation-linked increases.

Added to this, the state must reduce the over 29 000 millionaire managers in the public service by a third.

We welcome the initiative by Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube, who has inherited this issue. Her meeting with provincial counterparts today to address this urgent matter and engage with Treasury is a positive step forward.

The DA calls on other departments that will also be severely impacted, such as Health and Safety and Security, to follow suit and ensure that Treasury is fully engaged in mitigating these devastating cuts.

While the effect of these cuts on basic education was highlighted in a presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education on 20 August, we are yet to fully comprehend the devastating consequences that will be felt across other critical services, such as healthcare and policing. There must be a thorough assessment, and Treasury must urgently intervene to prevent these disastrous outcomes from becoming a reality.

The DA agrees with Western Cape Education MEC David Maynier that teacher unions need to collaborate with provincial governments to find sustainable solutions to teacher funding shortfalls. Cooperation, not confrontation, is key to ensuring that the education of our children is not compromised.

The DA will continue to push for responsible budgeting and hold the government accountable to ensure that no teacher, nurse, or police officer is forced out of their job due to poor fiscal management. We cannot allow the future of our public services to be compromised.