By Reuben Maleka
The Minister of Finance’s involvement in the current protracted public service salary negotiations is unnecessarily complicating the process and adding to workers’ growing frustration.
The minister’s role is, however, regulated in terms of sections 78 and 79 of the Public Service Regulations. These sections provide that the state can enter into a collective agreement only if there is a realistic calculation of costs involved in both the current and the subsequent fiscal year.
The agreement must also not be in conflict with Treasury regulations. In addition, the relevant governmental authority can cover the costs from its own departmental budget or based on a written commitment to provide additional funds from Treasury, or from budgets of other departments with their written agreement and Treasury approval.
Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana recently revealed national and provincial government departments collectively underspent by R28billion last year, despite public servants being denied well-deserved salary increases during (a time of) economic hardships.
These employees are, in addition, working in dilapidated buildings with no ventilation, cracked walls, and leaking roofs in contravention of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Educators and learners are still using pit toilets at some schools, with overcrowding being the order of the day.
Despite this dire situation, the minister failed in his duty to oversee that his department spent the available budget and has allowed departments to get away with murder regarding poor working conditions. Youth unemployment is soaring while staff shortages are crippling most government departments owing to the implementation of austerity measures by government and underspending.
The minister’s involvement in public service salary negotiations is based on an obsession to reduce employee costs, which has already adversely affected the efficiency of government machinery to provide quality services to the public.
Underspending, maladministration, and corruption are barriers to service delivery and will only be eradicated if there is political will and stringent consequence management under the Finance Ministry’s guidance and oversight that is missing.
Many departments continuously return unused money, warranting urgent intervention by Treasury to capacitate the management or demand accountability for the failure to perform as per the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).
The Public Servants Association (PSA) is extremely concerned the finance minister does not seem to have a plan in place to ensure that departments involved are able to spend their budgets, leaving room for recurrence of this unfortunate situation.
Despite the PFMA providing that underspending and overspending amount to financial misconduct and should be treated as such, failure to properly staff departments cannot be ignored. Failure to use available budget robs employees and the public of their rights to a conducive work environment, improved salaries, and quality service delivery, respectively.
The PSA thus urges the minister to redirect his energy to his own department and act decisively against financial misconduct in any form and to fill public service vacancies with immediate effect to restore impaired service delivery.
Recent media reports that global consultancy, Bain & Company, has been banned from UK government contracts for three years for its role in facilitating the capture of the South African Revenue Service is an indication that Treasury is failing in its role to manage its central database for procurement.
The reality is that companies also implicated in the State Capture Report will continue to enjoy government contracts, while it takes a foreign country to act decisively on a company that wronged the country.
At the same time, the Minister of Finance is focusing his energy on further crippling the state capacity with so-called managing of the wage bill. Treasury has a critical role to play in eradicating fraud and corruption in procurement of goods and services by the entire public sector, including state-owned entities.
The focus should be to rebuild the economy rather than attacking public servants’ salaries and conditions of service. The February 28 Constitutional Court judgment has adverse consequences for the future of collective bargaining and the state’s commitment to orderly collective bargaining.
Public servants were, as a result, denied negotiated salary increases. It is further alarming that the acting minister of public service and administration who carries the state mandate to negotiate salaries and other conditions of service, seems not to appreciate the adverse consequences of his department to have authorised the signing of the agreement, which through a court judgment, robbed public servants of over R30 billion in salary increases for the 2020/21-financial year.
The minister of public service and administration is the delegated minister to deal with public service wage negotiations at the level of the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council, as regulated by regulation 78(2), which states that, “An executive authority may enter into a collective agreement on a matter of mutual interest only if that authority (a) is responsible for managing collective bargaining on behalf of the State as employer in that forum; (b) has authority to deal with the matter concerned; and (c) meets the fiscal requirements contained in regulation 79.”
The minister of finance’s only role is to ensure that there is compliance with regulation 79 and to give such a written confirmation. The PSA believes the involvement of the minister is unnecessary in the negotiation process and is unduly delaying the conclusion of a collective agreement.
It fails to understand the direct interest of the minister of finance in this process as he is part of the Mandating Committee of Government, and his involvement in the negotiation process should stop at that level.
* Maleka is the Assistant general-manager for collective bargaining at the Public Servants’ Association