By Daanyaal Matthews
Governments plan to incentivize the early retirement of public sector workers, which will cost them R11 billion. This has sparked conversation in the Republic on the necessity to cut public expenditure, specifically the public sector wage bill, with some arguing that the government is not targeting the true leaks in the budget.
For Dominic Brown, Alternative Information and Development Centre’s economist, governments focus on culling public expenditure by decreasing those under the employ of the state, which is an unfounded strategy that has been tried before to little benefit of the average South African.
“Ultimately, when we look at the size of the public sector over the past 30 years, it has systematically been eroded. In 1994, the size of the public sector was 1.295 million workers when we had a population of 42 million; now the public sector is 1 .3 million workers when we have the size of the population of 62 million. So, when we look at the public sector as a percentage of the population, it’s extremely low, less than 2%, and this is in fact lower than other lower-income countries,” stressed the economist.
For Brown, the argument should be towards the expansion of the public sector rather than its contraction, as doing so would be beneficial to average South Africans, pointing to an increased quality of service delivery if more were to work in the cog of government.
“What you have is a situation where you have one healthcare worker servicing double the amount of people than they had to in the past. You have the size of classrooms dramatically increasing. When you have this situation, it is very difficult for these public sector workers to deliver services adequately and efficiently. So, the problem is not public sector workers; the fact is that we have not done enough towards investing in expanding the public sector,” argued Brown.
Listen to the full interview here:
Photo: GCIS
