Government has moved from ‘bailout budgeting’ to ‘slash and burn budgeting’

Ashor Sarupen MP - DA Spokesperson on Appropriations, speech in the debate on the Division of Revenue Bill, National Assembly, 19 March 2021

Madame Speaker,

For the past three years, we have seen the bailout budget after bailout budget. We have seen the state choose airlines over infrastructure, and the leviathan state extend its tentacles further and further into debt to keep its failing state-owned enterprises afloat, while squeezing taxpayers, ratepayers and businesses harder and harder, year in and year out.

This year, the Division of Revenue Bill shows us that we have moved from bailout budgeting to slash and burn budgeting. Slash and burn because the state has run out of other peoples money. Slash because the state is slashing funding to provinces that provide healthcare and education. Slash because the state is cutting funding to local government at a time when municipalities are failing to the point that the courts are stepping in and handing service delivery functions to residents and ratepayers associations. And burn because the state last year burnt R10-billion on an airline that hasn’t had a single flight.

Slash and burn is all that is left when you choose radical and extremist pet projects over services and social protection. Provincial governments are facing R222-billion in reductions over the medium term, and an already ailing local government is facing R18-billion in cuts.

Even your own Fiscal and Finance Commission has said that these choice of cuts are going to destroy service delivery.

While some of the cuts to provincial budgets are based on reductions to the public wage bill - a necessary measure – you can be assured that this slash and burn approach will see ANC-run provinces fail to hire teachers, doctors and nurses, while protecting bloated administrative offices to ensure that every cadre has sheltered employment where productivity counts for zero.

Other cuts to provinces are based on the assumption that infrastructure grants won’t be spent or are consistently underspent, but this underspending is only true for eight provinces – all of them happen to be ANC run.

When you look at local government, every South African needs to know this one fact about the ANC’s slash and burn approach to budgets and how the ANC chooses cadres over citizens:

R329-million is being cut from the municipal infrastructure grant – the funding for roads, for water purification, for new electrical substations – and a further R21-million is being cut from the integrated development grant, to fund something else. Can you guess where this money is going? It is going to a once-off payment for non-returning councillors! More than half of the councillors in the country are elected on an ANC ticket, and every ANC councillor that has failed his or her community and loses his or her seat will be getting money that should have been used to save failing municipalities!