SACP Eastern Cape press statement on the Provincial Budget Speech
4 March 2010
The SACP notes the Provincial Budget Speech as delivered by the MEC Mcebisi Jonasi in the Eastern Cape Legislature yesterday, March 3, 2010. We also welcome the positive elements of the budget like the increase in some of the key priority areas like the school nutrition programme, HIV/AIDS and TB treatment. Also important to welcome are financial management measures mentioned in the speech so that service delivery is not compromised.
These critical interventions are for the benefit of the children of working class families who go to school on an empty stomach and the majority affected and infected by HIV/AIDS and related opportunistic diseases.
However, we are of the firm view that the budget has not sufficiently elevated the priorities as contained in the ANC election manifesto. Especially for our rural province, the issue of rural development has not been given the required focus with dedicated resources as its increase represents a mere R400 million compared with the 2009/10 budget. In this context, we believe that the budget should have responded on the implication of the electricity increases to the ability of our people to pay for services to our revenue challenged municipalities as correctly identified in the speech.
The speech has also failed to indicate measures towards placing our economy on a new growth path as committed by Minister Pravin Gordhan when he delivered his budget speech weeks ago. The SACP is deeply concerned that in line with the policy of GEAR the creation of decent work as in our election manifesto is postponed to follow economic growth in some distant future and focusing more on creating work opportunities "for now".
Whilst the commitment to build a developmental activist state is welcomed by ensuring that government leads the process of service delivery not the current heavy reliance on consultants, the speech fails to elevate the Planning Commission and its evaluation and monitoring capacity as part of ensuring that the above is achieved. Even the budget of the office of the Premier clearly falls short in taking forward this important reality of the need to build government capacity to plan and monitor. In line with our commitment of building a developmental state, the SACP believe that we need a very strong public sector as a key component of a developmental state and therefore our mindset towards the public sector workers need to change.
We need to see them more as an investment not as a burdensome cost as implied in the budget speech. As the SACP, we believe that there is lot that needs to be done to change things in the province for the better and commit ourselves to work with our alliance partners in putting our country and province on a new economic growth path. For it is the current semi-colonial growth path that reproduces poverty and unemployment and killing the rural economies and bottle our people in few urban towns to compete for limited resources with ballooning levels of informal settlements.
As the SACP, we call upon our people join us as we campaign to fight against capitalist greed and expose and defeat all corrupt practices in support of the provincial government. These are peoples resources not for "tenderpreneurs"
Xolile Nqatha
Provincial Secretary
South African Communist Party
Eastern Cape Province
082 3131 5005
