BRUCE WHITFIELD: More pay? Now? Seriously?

I recently applied for a new passport for my 10-year-old son. It arrived a week after I ordered it.

I defy any country to do better.

However, the process of getting to the point of application was as torturous as it is antiquated. Home affairs has failed to keep up with the times in terms of user-friendly IT systems, which, in a country with some of the poorest education outcomes in the world, should be considerably more intuitive than they are.

Navigating the home affairs payment and bookings platform is akin to trying to decipher hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And for anyone who has given up on making a booking and done it the old-fashioned way of going to a home affairs branch, the public service despondency and the sheer inadequacy of the process and organisation at those facilities are symptomatic of a rising level of state failure.

Never mind the fact that to apply for a child passport, both parents need to take a day’s leave from work to do so as there is no certainty as to how long the process will take, even if, like most people, you join the queue at 4am to try to guarantee being seen on that particular day. But you must also remove the child from school as they need to be present to verify their existence. And if “the system is down”, you have to do it all again another day. It’s as bad trying to apply for any document critical to navigate the country’s bureaucracy — from birth certificates to IDs and death certificates.

Fortunately, the private sector stepped into that breach to alleviate some of the frustration a few years ago, with banks offering space in some branches for home affairs to set up satellite outlets to more efficiently deliver passports and IDs. It’s a welcome relief. But you must penetrate and navigate “the system” first.

If you ran your business with the same disdain for the customer as home affairs, you would be out of business within weeks. Once through the spaghetti of the system, with a booking secured a month from application date, the process is good.

Just don’t book the 2pm slot. At least not where I did.

On that particular day, and possibly on many more like it, just one of the four booths was occupied by a home affairs official. He worked quickly and diligently in processing applications. But progress only picked up when three colleagues returned from their lunch break at 2.21pm. Our application was done and dusted by 3pm. Hardly a hardship, but it’s indicative of a bigger problem in the public sector.

When I returned to collect the document a week later (impressive, yes) just before the 3.30pm deadline for the home affairs element of the branch to shut, there was not an official to be found. I am reliably informed by bank staff that the home affairs officials at that branch routinely squeal into work not a moment earlier than necessary and are at their desks from about 9am to 1pm, whereupon there is an hour for lunch, and they are headed home by 3pm. That puts the average number of hours worked at that particular outlet at six hours, seven if you add the obligatory lunch break.

Now, civil servants are on strike, because, like the rest of us, they are feeling the pain of the cost of living crisis which is afflicting the globe. For now, the government is offering 3%; the unions are demanding more than twice that. It’s going to be hard for the government to hold the line because the outcome of this standoff will no doubt be weaponised for use at the ANC elective conference just over a month from now.

The average civil servant in South Africa earns more than R450,000 a year, a little over R38,000 a month, and according to Nedbank economist Isaac Matshego, they have been beneficiaries of above-inflation increases for years even as the size of the real economy has shrunk. Between 2009 and 2019, public sector wage increases grew on average two percentage points above inflation every year. It’s unsustainable.

At some point common sense must prevail. Giving another significant increase with no productivity gains will simply make it harder for the country to recover from its economic malaise. The revenue windfalls primarily due to the global boom in commodity prices will not continue in perpetuity. And before someone shouts “executive remuneration” — let’s agree it’s excessive — that comes at no burden to the fiscus besides those gains are taxed at the marginal rate.

Somehow the government needs to break the strong upward trajectory of the public sector wage bill so that money can go where it’s really needed: into projects and infrastructure to create entry-level jobs and grease the wheels of the economy. We cannot hope for growth in this electricity-starved economy and keeping doling out cash we don’t have.

It’s easy to suggest the increases should be funded by a rise in income taxes for those fortunate enough to be employed, or the populist idea of a wealth tax or some other crackpot scheme to make up for revenue shortfalls into the future.

South Africa already has one of the world’s most progressive tax systems in which a tiny minority pay the bills at proportionately higher levels of taxation for the income they earn. No sensible person can object to that principle, but tax systems reach breaking point when compliance fails because the demand on those that pay simply becomes unreasonable or unsustainable and they take their earning potential elsewhere.

In simple terms, it is costing too much to run the country. We spend considerably more than we earn. It’s costing us very nearly R1bn a day just to service the interest on our debt, never mind the capital repayments, and services everywhere are being reduced while civil servants take a rising proportion of what is left.

Something has to give.