MPs on Parliament’s finance committee on Wednesday approved the Adjustment Appropriation Bill with some misgivings, feeling that they had not had sufficient time to interrogate its clauses properly.
The Bill is an annual event by which Parliament appropriates extra funds for spending on items which are unavoidable, and which were unforeseen at the time of the national budget in February.
This year gives more money to the government to pay its employees whose salaries have been diminished by the rampant inflation that has hit the country since the budget was announced.
Almost R5-billion is allocated to pay civil servants more for the rest of the year — the agreement with the public servants gave them the inflation rate plus 1%. This was calculated at 7,5% in February but now is at 10%.
MPs also questioned the small amount of extra money — R20 — being given to social-grant pensioners.
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told the committee: “In my tenure as finance minister, this is the first time we have made any in-year adjustment to any grant.”
But he said that the committee was free to vote it down if it wished.
The committee was, however, mollified when Kuben Naidoo of the Treasury’s budget department pointed out that together with the R60 voted in February, the grants have been increased by R80 this year.
The child-support grant was only increased by R10 in February, so the extra R20 has increased it by 15% — higher than inflation.
Inflation is also being covered in the school nutrition programme; the student financial aid scheme; teaching support materials in schools; medical, housing and fuel costs for particularly the police; and the cost of free basic electricity.
The Bill also gives more money (R260-million) to pay the indemnity claim by Denel Saab Aerostructures under the indemnity agreement between the government, Saab and Denel. This is something the MPs felt they needed to have more carefully explained to them.
In particular, they would have liked to call the Department of Public Enterprises and Denel before them to give an account of themselves.
“Matters have not been fully answered,” complained the committee chairperson, Nhlanhla Nene. “In the eyes of the committee we are just signing out cheques.”
But he said that in the interests of the nation, “we want matters to proceed”.
“There is general agreement among all of us,” he said, “there is no way we can stall this. It is coming up for debate tomorrow in the House and if we delay it beyond that we would be delaying deserving departments.”
Other deserving departments include provincial and local government — which needs cash to pay for havoc wrought by foul weather in the Western and Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal — and housing, to cover the costs of temporarily accommodating people displaced during the spasm of xenophobic violence earlier this year.
The Department of Minerals and Energy is to get its hands on an extra R180-million to help with the demand-side management programme it has undertaken — in particular by supplying free compact fluorescent light bulbs to replace incandescent light bulbs and so cut down on power use.
The Department of Sport and Recreation will get R1,4-billion to pay for the cost overruns in stadium building for the Soccer World Cup, and the Communications Department will get R600-million for the “last mile” access network between the stadiums and the Telkom network. — I-Net Bridge