Glenda Daniels While a lower-level employee at the African National Congress headquarters said last week she was looking for another job because she did not get an increase this year and earns only R2 600 after tax, ministers who earn about R40 000 a month got a 10% increase. Top ANC officials such as secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe and head of national communications Smuts Ngonyama would earn in the region of R300 000 a year, a source disclosed.
Motlanthe in his speech at the recent ANC national general council conference called for workers to heed the inflation target, set by the government and the Reserve Bank, of between 3% and 6%. Organised labour lambasted this stance by the ruling party. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)says that while it had agreed to an inflation target after extensive discussion within unions, it has categorically said this should not be linked to wage restraint – considering that South Africa has one of the highest wage gaps in the world. “Greater macro-economic co-ordination remains an imperative. This is important given the government’s decision to adopt an inflation monetary policy. For this to succeed requires the buy-in of the government, labour and the private sector. Inflation targeting requires prices, which are set by government-controlled bodies, and wages to be set around the inflation target – between 3% and 6%,” Motlanthe said at the conference. Cosatu is critical of the fact that what a minister earns in a month is more than twice what an unskilled worker in the public service earns in a year. Cosatu’s co-ordinator for fiscal monetary and public sector policy, Neva Makgetla, says: “Between 5% and 10% of workers, including domestic workers, in South Africa earn less than R500 a month. How, then, does this justify a blanket wage restraint? “The top earners in the country are overpaid and workers at the bottom are underpaid. It is corrupting that people in the top bracket of the government earn so much. An average teacher’s salary is about R5 000 a month. “In [Minister of Finance] Trevor Manuel’s budget speech there was an assurance that an inflation target would not entail a wage restraint,” says Makgetla. Ngonyama said he could not reveal financial details such as wage increases in the organisation.
He said the “financial affairs of the ANC are an internal matter”.