ALAN WINDE: Act today to secure South Africa’s tomorrow

South Africa is inching closer to a fiscal emergency, and the urgency with which we need to address this has not, and is not, being demonstrated by President Cyril Ramaphosa and his administration.

In my state of the province address earlier this year, I quoted Martin Luther King, who in 1963 said: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now ... This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

I feel that fierce urgency of now every time I talk to a resident, a small-business owner or a public servant. We are desperate for urgent action today for tomorrow, yet I am not seeing the ferocity to rise to the challenge in the national government.

The need to act now is best demonstrated in our education system. In the next few weeks, we need to make critical choices that will inform the 2024 school year, and we don’t have the clarity we need to do that. 

When it became clear that the president wasn’t going to give this issue the priority it deserves by placing it on the agenda of the president’s co-ordinating council (PCC) on September 1, I raised the matter. I did this to drive home the urgency of now.

My deepest concerns over this looming crisis relate to the profound impact it will have on frontline service delivery, particularly for our most vulnerable residents. I fear that health care, education, and social development especially will suffer.

This crisis is made worse by the indecision of a national government that is out of touch with the reality of ordinary South Africans and unwilling and unable — or both — to make the hard decisions needed now.

I will not tolerate this trend of ignoring reality. We are paying a hefty price for this inaction. For more than 15 years the government has fumbled in the dark of the energy crisis — and yet in 2023 we’ve had our worst year of load-shedding yet. Despite the evident, chronic failures at state-owned entity (SOE) Transnet, we see not action, but more inaction.

At the PCC I detailed what can be done to offset the impact of this perilous situation:

• We as government have to do everything we can to make it easier for our citizens to get jobs and create jobs; and 
• We have to allow strong provincial and local governments to do more for their residents through devolving powers and funding to them.

In addition, I raised the need to:

• Adopt a new approach to wage negotiations and reach agreement on measures to curtail the compensation of employees; 
• Strengthen SOE governance and accountability to support regional and local economic development; 
• Open the electricity transmission network to private sector investment; 
• Strengthen local government regulation to enable service delivery; 
• Revitalise home affairs to reduce backlogs and improve the quality of services provided; and
• Improve the service to beneficiaries of social grants.

Rather than fiddling at the margins, our position is “do everything you can to grow the economy”.

Putting people first

My concerns are heightened by the effect this impending financial crisis could have on the Western Cape’s solid governance record, which enables us to be resident-obsessed and to focus on critical service delivery.

Good governance is the bedrock for enabling service delivery. This was most recently demonstrated in Stats SA’s nonfinancial census of municipalities, which measures select aspects of service delivery. It shows that, in 2021, the Western Cape had the highest number of consumer units receiving water services and free basic water services (39.8%), electricity and free basic electricity services (27.9%), sewerage and sanitation and free basic sewerage and sanitation services (45.8%), and solid waste management and free basic solid waste management services (44.8%). 

These numbers reflect our indefatigable drive to keep delivering to our residents, particularly the poor and the most vulnerable. It is because of our citizens that I will keep pushing the president and his administration to come to their senses and reconsider their unviable and unsustainable policies.

Borrowing our way out of this impending catastrophe is not a solution. In February finance minister Enoch Godongwana reported a possible budget deficit of 4% of GDP, resulting in debt of R4.7-trillion. Government debt seems to be moving closer to 6.5% of GDP, or R6-trillion.

This is an unsustainable and irresponsible approach to the crisis. 

These cuts would happen at precisely the moment when our poorest communities need these services most — and when we face extensive pressure to expand services to accommodate the Western Cape’s growing population. (We expect it to reach 10-million by 2040.)

This adds to the urgency in planning, and investing in the future needs of our residents. For example, we plan to spend about R32bn over the 2023 medium-term expenditure framework on critical infrastructure projects. This will fuel economic growth and job creation.

While national government delays and allows this crisis to snowball, I have requested that our government look at multiple scenarios to help us plan how we can protect services while growing and enabling our economy, which is the ultimate longer-term solution.

The right approach is not to see how we can divide a shrinking pie, but how we can grow the pie for all of us, with that fierce urgency of now.

* Winde is the premier of the Western Cape