NEHAWU STATEMENT ON THE DEPUTY PRESIDENT’S CONFIRMATION THAT THE PUBLIC SERIVE WILL BE SCALED DOWN
Friday August 31, 2018
The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union [NEHAWU] is distraught by the confirmation by the Deputy President of the country, Honourable DD Mabuza, that the public service will be scaled down as part of cost-cutting measures.
During a question and answer session yesterday at the National Assembly the Deputy President further reinforced the assertion made by the President of the country, Honourable Cyril Ramaphosa, during the State of the Nation address in February 2018 that there is impending jobs cuts and intentions to reduce the wage bill in the public service. As NEHAWU, we forthright reject any reconfiguration of government that will result in a job bloodbath. When the media ran a story about government’s plan to shed jobs the national union warned government about such a detrimental move and vowed to fire with fire. The Department of Public Service and Administration [DPSA] quickly issued a statement to allay our fears and dispelled the notion of the impending job losses.
We are, however, infuriated by the confirmation by the Deputy President that the public service will be scaled down as part of austerity measures. As things stand, the public service is already heavily understaffed because of austerity measures introduced by National Treasury. We vehemently rejected the tired widely held but false belief that the public service is bloated. Currently we have about 1, 3 million public servants servicing a population of 52 million people. The lack of adequate personnel in the public service has resulted in service delivery being adversely affected especially in health and education.