This week Finance Minister Trevor Manuel became the king of bling. The mini-budget released this week is replete with showy and insubstantial spending. South Africa is to splurge — on 2010; on the Gautrain; and on a series of sometimes dubious industrial projects. What’s going on?
Surely, there any number of ways Manuel could productively spend taxpayers’ rands — on education, health, safety, housing and welfare — without making public appeals for deserving projects!
The problem, paradoxically, is that money is no longer the problem. Manuel’s Cabinet colleagues battle to spend the moola, and to spend it well.
His medium-term budget, which both tells us where we are at by the half-way mark and how he intends trying to spend our money over the next three years, shows that next year he will rake in about R9-billion more than he will spend. It highlights the fact that the government of a developing state, one with a huge negative legacy and where people beg for food and money on the streets, is budgeting for a surplus. Manuel’s three-year plan shows he expects to run zero or marginal deficits over the next three years — while the conventional wisdom mandates that governments can prudently run budget deficits of 3% of GDP to stimulate growth and development.
This is the equivalent of about R50-billion a year over the next three years which Manuel is apparently willing to forgo largely because the state does not have the absorptive capacity to oversee a development programme which matches affordability.
This places the minister in quite a bind. He cannot reduce his budget surplus by cutting taxes, because this will play havoc with Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni’s attempts to rein in consumer spending and keep inflation within its tidy band.
Manuel has been partly saved by the 2010 World Cup, which will absorb R15-billion. But mostly, he has been baled out by his colleague, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, who is looking increasing like a one-person economy.
Erwin will get billions to invest in a range of pet projects including the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (R6-billion), technology that works in a test tube but is entirely unproven on any real scale; Infracor (R800-million), which is to build an undersea cable to tackle Telkom (in which government is a 37% shareholder); R840-million to keep state-owned Denel in the arms business; and R80-million to keep state-owned Alexkor mining diamonds.
“Alec rulz” — but should he? Should we be splurging on the PBMR just because we can? The transfusion into Denel can be seen as throwing good money after bad; there little prospect that South Africa can compete in the global arms bazaar and we may as well give up trying. Infracor is a good investment, but the mind boggles at the Alexkor price tag.
Next February, Manuel could easily double old-age pensions, which buoy up our rural areas and keep the wolves from millions of doors. Our teachers and nurses deserve much higher salaries, and by increasing the attractiveness of these professions, we can draw talented young people to them. Given South Africa’s mountain of economnic distress, there must be useful ways of using the lolly at Manuel’s disposal.
A question of maths
Now here’s a challenge to knee-jerk South African xenophobia. In an astonishingly imaginative piece of lateral thinking, the national department of education plans to recruit Zimbabwean schoolteachers as a partial solution to shortages in scarce skills subjects such as maths and science.
Latest estimates from the department are that we need 3 000 extra maths teachers in high schools alone. We report this week that the intended recourse to Zimbabwean teachers will not displace South Africans. Rather, the idea is that local teachers should be encouraged to take study leave during which they upgrade existing qualifications in scarce skills or be trained into those areas; and that Zimbabweans will replace teachers for the period of their sabbaticals.
Educationists rate the standards of Zimbabwean teacher qualifications highly, saying the calibre of teachers there puts some of our own educators to shame. There is also the immeasurable advantage that, because of intolerable working and living conditions in Zimbabwe, many of that troubled country’s educators are already here.
Some, though, are in the country illegally; and others find themselves in a bureaucratic wilderness when trying to obtain the professional registration without which no one can be employed in a public school. As a result, some are horrendously exploited in private institutions, working without contracts and on scandalously low salaries, even by South African standards. Others languish in the catering or security industries.
It should be abundantly clear that we cannot afford to spurn education talent that is on our doorstep and longing to work in our state school system. The government should ease whatever visa and other formalities are necessary to get these professionals into our classrooms as soon as possible.
So, good news this week for teacher supply and quality. Well, not entirely. Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s mini-budget announcement that there would be 1 400 bursaries for newly training teachers next year sounded good until you did the maths. We graduate 6 000 new teachers a year, but lose about 20 000. Back to the classroom, Minister, and repeat after us: We must train more teachers.