The budgets pushed through by ANC members in the Eastern Cape Provincial Legislature this afternoon is once again evidence of an ANC government that has truly lost touch with the plight of ordinary South Africans across our province.
How a government plans to spend public funds will tell you everything you need to know about what matters to them.
While Premier Oscar Mabuyane has been vocal about economic growth and stimulating the economy by following an infrastructure-led growth agenda, the budget tells a different story. Just 4.6c of every provincial rand on payments for capital assets.
Instead, the bulk of the funding will again go to paying employees, with the cost of employment rising to a staggering 66.1% of total receipts.
Stabilising the cost of employment at the targeted 60% of provincial expenditure would have freed up around R4.3 billion for goods and services and infrastructure-related expenditure.
The budget makes no provision to shield departments from loadshedding, unlike the Western Cape, where they’ve invested over a billion Rand over the MTF for loadshedding resilience.
It is a budget that will ensure that learners continue to go without textbooks or teachers in their classrooms and ensures that many of those reliant on scholar transport will never reach a classroom, to begin with. It also ensures that the healthcare system will continue to collapse and place lives at risk as accruals escalate and severely undermines community safety initiatives.
The ANC made it clear they would rather spend the money on deployed cadres than on real development. The welfare of our people will always play second fiddle to the insatiable need for ANC cadres to be rewarded with patronage, to secure support for the prevailing faction at the next ANC conference.
I know many MPLs in the ANC don’t agree with some of the budgets passed. However, they are forced to vote for them because they have been reduced to rubber-stamping whatever is before them.
The DA cannot be complicit in supporting budgets that further patronage rather than responding to the immediate needs of our people.