By Daanyaal Matthews
Governments intent to lessen fiscal debt have been staunch with Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, in his Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, noting that the government will be incentivizing early retirement in the public sector both to allow for the entry of younger workers and to lessen the wage bill.
This plan has been opposed by COSATU, who worry that this idea could lead to a ‘brain drain’ as more skilled employees are lost in retirement. Speaking on VOC’s Newsbeat show, COSATU Parliamentary Co-ordinator, Matthew Parks, stressed that this approach could lead to the degradation of government departments:
“You lose a lot of the skills that you do need and skills that we should not underestimate, as they take time to build up; they have a value to make, especially as the state is struggling on many fronts.”
For Parks, the true issue for the economy does not lie in the expenditure on the public sector but rather the lack of growth in the economy.
“The problem is not an expenditure problem. The problem is a growth problem. The economy is not growing at the pace you need to create the tax revenues the state needs to fund public services. It is not growing at the pace you need to create jobs so that people have jobs and pay income tax. So you address symptoms; you are not addressing the cause, and the cause is a stagnate economy,” argues the COSATU representative.
Listen to the full interview here:
