Ratepayers will be the ones paying for the 5.5% wage increase in the City of Cape Town, writes Mark Rountree.

Author, teacher and preacher Jim Wallis, an advisor to former President Obama's administration, said that "a budget is a moral document".

Worldwide, the public have sadly become accustomed to the empty words of politicians, but the true priorities and intentions of government leaders can be seen in the budgets that they approve.

South Africa is in the midst of a global pandemic which has triggered a worldwide recession.

The collapse of the US economy is on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To say that we are in for tough times is about as much of an understatement as an MP's recent suggestion that apartheid was subtly harmful to black people, but not really a crime against humanity (note: the United Nations declared otherwise).

In the private sector, costs are being slashed across the board to cope with the current and looming recession. Should we not be expecting the same from our governments?

Last week a ratepayers association from the City of Cape Town described some of its concerns about ballooning costs within the metro and the impact this is having on their members and municipal finance generally.

Whilst local councillors cannot dictate the salary increases of most government employees, councillors do control local government costs and the amount ratepayers must pay through approving or opposing: 

(1) the cost of services; 

(2) increases in their own salaries; 

(3) increases for senior managers; 

(4) the allocation of the municipal budget for staff costs overall and thus 

(5) the percentage of the property value that needs to be charged in rates in order to cover these costs. 

Rates and taxes can thus easily be controlled by managing costs responsibly.

Cape Town's Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson replied to ratepayers, reassuring them that "at least R450 million staff-related expenditure has been cut in this financial year". 

However, the truth is that costs were not cut or even stabilised. In the approved budget which the Deputy Mayor is responsible for, an additional R1.4 billion was added to the City of Cape Town staff costs. 

Sadly, the lies do not end there. The Deputy Mayor also told ratepayers that "the City manager and executive directors... did not receive any increase this year", but once again, his own budget disproves this. 

After inflating the costs of Cape Town’s executive directors by a whopping 31% last year, the DA approved an additional 13% increase for this year. 

Former Mayor Patricia de Lille’' team had, for several consecutive years, achieved real reductions in senior management expenses.

Costs of Executive Directors in Cape Town had been reduced by 23% in 2016/17 and a further 5% in 2017/18. When De Lille resigned in late 2018, then-Premier Helen Zille said she was unhappy at the way De Lille, who Zille described as principled and well intentioned, had been hounded out.

After De Lille's resignation, the DA's new Mayoral Committee under Dan Plato immediately reversed the savings achieved over the previous years, increasing the budgets for executive directors by 31% in 2019 and a further 13% and 2020.

Salaries of several executive directors, like the R3.3 million package of Craig Kesson, husband of the DA's chief whip in the Western Cape, now exceed that of President Ramaphosa.

Ironically, although the DA approved these huge increases in Cape Town, it simultaneously opposed smaller increases in other metros.

This year, the DA opposed Durban's R1.1 billion wage increase, but approved Cape Town's R1.4 billion wage increase.

The DA described Durban's staff cost increase of 9.5% (with 6.25% for senior officials), as "exorbitant" and opposed it, but approved Cape Town's 8.9% staff cost increase (with 30% to 50% increases for some senior officials). As for the benefits to the politicians themselves, the DA opposed Durban's 4% increase for councillors, but approved Cape Town's 5.5% increase. 

The hypocrisy is a cruel joke and it is the ratepayers who will pay for the punchline. 

These enormous increases have eaten away at money that could have been allocated to essential services, to food kitchens or used to stop tariff and rates increases this year.

Instead of inflating costs, government needs to follow the example of the private sector by cutting non-essential spending and freezing or reducing salary budgets wherever possible.

I congratulate our leader of GOOD, now Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, Patricia de Lille, on her department's recent achievement of reducing the costs of state funerals by more than 99%.

This is the kind of radical cost cutting we need to see, soon, across all spheres of government and within the more than 700 State Owned Enterprises. 

Improved efficiencies will be needed to safely navigate the coming recession and continue to provide services without inflating rates and taxes.

- Mark Rountree, National Policy Officer for GOOD.

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