President Thabo Mbeki has strongly criticised a report in last week’s Sunday Times, saying the newspaper is ”entirely wrong” in its claim that no additional funds have been set aside by the government for its expanded public works programme (EPWP).
Writing in his weekly newsletter, published on the African National Congress’s ANC Today website on Friday, Mbeki said the report and an accompanying editorial display a seemingly complete ignorance of published government documents and are ”strange and false”.
In its July 25 edition, the Sunday Times — under the headline ”Mbeki passes buck on job creation” — said the president had told a meeting of premiers and mayors there was no new money to co-finance the government’s R15-billion EPWP.
”The programme — which was the ANC’s 2004 election drawcard — promised to create a million jobs in the next five years.
”Mbeki said provinces and municipalities should use their existing infrastructure grants … to finance the EPWP, as the national government would not fork out additional money,” the newspaper stated.
In an editorial in the same issue, the Sunday Times commented on the report, saying that unless the president is able to show he is allocating new resources to job creation, ”the unemployed will have to live with the fact that they were the useful idiots of the April election”.
In his letter, Mbeki said the Sunday Times has clearly ”come to the conclusion that the Expanded Public Works Programme died even before it was born”.
”It is convinced that the programme lived only in the deceitful election rhetoric of the ANC. As a vigilant ‘watchdog’, it has taken on the responsibility to convince its readers that the programme is nothing more than a very cruel ANC election hoax, aimed at deceiving the poor.”
However, the newspaper is ”entirely wrong in its discovery that no additional funds have been set aside for the EPWP”.
Mbeki said the report raises three important issues:
- The newspaper’s seemingly complete ignorance of published government documents, including the 2004/05 Budget and Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, already approved by Parliament;
- Its seemingly complete ignorance of how South Africa’s 10-year-old system of government works, especially regarding the three spheres of government; and
- Its conviction that the ANC is capable of massive dishonesty and fraud, such that it could put a critical transformation programme to the people in order to get votes, knowing that no funds are available to finance this programme.
Mbeki said it is difficult to understand why the Sunday Times ”did not undertake the simple exercise of determining whether the national Budget provided the additional resources we had promised, and whether these had been transferred to the provinces and municipalities”.
”Instead, it invented the fiction that, on behalf of the national government, we had told the provincial governments to reorder their existing budgets to come up with R15-billion for its ‘expanded’ public works programme”.
If the newspaper had taken the trouble it would have found out the additional allocations for the EPWP are contained in the 2004/05 Budget.
Further, provision has been made for their transfer to the provinces and municipalities, as reflected in the schedules attached to the Division of Revenue Act 2004.
What the ANC promised the poor was based on available funds, provided for in the Budget.
Mbeki said the ”strange and false discoveries” of the Sunday Times with regard to the EPWP raise a number of serious concerns.
”One of these relates to the quality of journalism in our country. The sorry tale told by the Sunday Times‘s handling of the EPWP issue points to the reality of a serious national problem,” he said. — Sapa