EDITORIAL: Children are a silent casualty of the wage deal

One in four of SA’s children aged under five is stunted, according to the government’s own figures. Even in the relatively well-resourced Western Cape, which has seen marked improvement in the past few years, a shocking 17.5% of kids are short for their age and at risk of impaired brain development. The prospect of their plight being addressed any time soon has just taken a huge step backwards.

Late on Friday night, the Treasury quietly announced that the government had caved into union demands. Tough trade-offs lay ahead, it warned, as it hiked the wage bill for SA’s 1.3 million civil servants by an extra R37.4bn in 2023-24. As Treasury remains committed to narrowing the fiscal deficit, there is a finite pot of money to spend: increasing remuneration for state employees means there will be less for everything else.

Once again, the government has bowed to those who shout loudest. In 2015 it acceded to the demands of violent and destructive university students protesting over the cost of tuition and announced free tertiary education for people from impoverished and working-class households. Since these funds had not been budgeted for, government departments across the board were instructed to cut spending. In education, the government took from Peter to pay Paul, paring back the allocations previously earmarked for school infrastructure and textbooks to cover students attending universities and technical and vocational education trading colleges. 

This time it is organised labour that has won the shouting match. Last month the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union brought hospitals and clinics to a standstill in a show of violence and intimidation that shook even habitually hardened politicians. It is no coincidence that civil servants, who were already receiving close to a third of the expenditure budget before the wage deal was signed, just got a whole lot more.

Their victory comes at the expense of SA’s most vulnerable. There will clearly now be a squeeze on funding for state schools and public health services, and less hope of money for initiatives specifically aimed at improving the lot of children. While the government is to be lauded for establishing a school feeding scheme that reaches 9.6-million learners, it only operates during term time and does not reach babies and toddlers who are too young to join the formal education system.

There is a strong economic argument for investing in measures to prevent stunting, according to the World Bank, which estimates that every $1 directed at preventing this condition generates an $11 economic return. In SA, investing in a generation free of stunting would enable one million more children to thrive each year and increase GDP by at least 2%, according to the non-profit DG Murray Trust.

Malnourished children do not take to the streets and cause mayhem to express their frustration at the status quo. They need the adults in the room to act on their behalf. We know what they need: a nutritious diet with the right balance of carbohydrates, healthy fats, protein and micronutrients. The question is how to ensure they get it. One possible solution flighted by the trust is a R1.8bn annual subsidy to enable food retailers to cut the price of 10 nutritious products by 30%, thus making them more affordable to poor households. The tragedy of last week’s wage deal is that selling ideas like this to the Treasury just got a whole lot harder.