SPEECH BY BRETT HERRON TO THE WESTERN CAPE PROVINCIAL PARLIAMENT, GOOD MEMBER & SECRETARY-GENERAL
1 December 2020
The Western Cape is in deep trouble.
Our government, and the governing party, is adrift – unable to present a coherent plan to navigate the financial turmoil we are in.
The so-called “Budget to Bounce Back” is nothing more than a Potemkin Village – a pretentiously showy façade intended to mask or divert attention from this embarrassing fact.
This government claims it will spend an additional R1,1 billion on “jobs”.
R814m of this is the Presidential Employment Initiative which by design will fund additional posts in the education sector. This is creating jobs by direct employment – not by stimulating a sector of our economy.
Then they have added in the R61m additional conditional grant for road maintenance and R155m for maintenance and infrastructure repairs at schools.
Obviously infrastructure spending does generate jobs in the construction sector. But if they want to add the additional allocations for infrastructure, and claim this as contributing to job creation, they must also subtract where this government is failing to spend on infrastructure.
For example, the Department of Transport and Public Works has surrendered R155 million from its Transport Infrastructure budget due to slow spending on road infrastructure projects.
It has also surrendered R45 million from its Public Works Infrastructure budget because it has failed to spend this on the maintenance of Child and Youth Care Centres.
In addition to surrendering R200 million from infrastructure projects the Department of Transport and Public Works has transferred R90 million from transport infrastructure projects, due to slow spending, to non-infrastructure items like the integrated transport hub and the Go George project.
So when it comes to infrastructure based job creation we are actually in negative territory because this government cannot spend the funding it already allocated.
It is profoundly dishonest to add in the additional allocations but not to deduct the surrendered and viremented funding. The intention is to mislead the people of this province.
On the subject of misleading, this government, and the governing party, claims that the source of all woes is the SAA bailout.
They claim that the provincial government’s conditional grants were cut by R86 million to finance the bailout.
But in actual fact the province received a nett increase in conditional grants of R81 million and the cuts they referred to are in reality a reprioritisation of spending.
While they complain about the national government policy decision to rescue SAA their own 2019 election manifesto proposes that SAA be placed into business rescue.
This is exactly what has led to the need to find R10.5 billion. Perhaps they don’t understand business rescue – it just sounded good in a manifesto.
But they never deal with the Minister of Public Enterprises claim that if SAA was liquidated the South African fiscus would have to find R18 billion to cover debt that would immediately become due.
At a time when we need level heads, smart minds and honest brokers – we have a government flailing about and purposefully misleading the people of this province. They’re simply not up to the task.
Ends…