The People’s Budget Campaign (PBC), which comprises the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), the South African NGO Coalition (Sangoco) and the South African Council of Churches, has argued that the Medium Term Budget Policy Statement’s (MTBPS) is thin on details regarding broader social targets and fails to properly account for the supposed drop in unemployment statistics.
While the PBC praised the Treasury for its relatively high housing expenditure, it expressed concern over the public housing model. Unless revised, the PBC claims it will replicate apartheid settlement patterns and aggravate unemployment by settling working class communities far from job opportunities.
“Building stand-alone units for separate households is more expensive, compared to building decent family apartments located close to the CBD like they have in Brazil,” says Cosatu parliamentary office research coordinator Elroy Paulus. “If the government supports housing projects within the CBD and subsidises the people to live in them, the return on investment for the government would be much better.”
The PBC said that the Treasury failed to review spending on the roll-out of anti-retroviral drugs and was not accelerating this process and other related services quickly enough. It says that while R431-million was rolled over in the health department in the 2004/05 financial year, only 10% of the people who currently need anti-retrovirals have access to them, and 50% of these were on private schemes.
It also says the 4,1% increase budgeted for public service personnel will not create a better skilled, larger and more professional public service.
While it welcomed the “modest” 0,8% increase in the tax: GDP ratio, it said this was still insufficient in light of the social deficits and massive inequalities left by apartheid. For every 1% increase in the ratio, the PBC said, the government has R15-billion more to spend on economic and social reconstruction.
The government’s claims about the reduction of unemployment in recent years, also drew the PBC’s ire.
It says the government is fully aware that the reduction was not because of job creation but the withdrawal of discouraged workers from the labour force. It says the government must, as promised, establish why this has happened.
“Four or five months ago, Stats SA dropped the expanded definition of unemployment to follow the international standard which is defined along narrow lines that do not include people too discouraged to look for work,” said Paulus.
The campaign called on minister Trevor Manuel to consider extending the child support grant to include 18-year-olds, and roll out the basic income grant. “Substantive research done by respected economists showed that the cost of rolling out the basic income grant is far less than initially purported. It would be around R 28-billion.”