Treasury must intervene as frontline services face urgent crisis – DA – POLITICS

The threat to teaching and other frontline service jobs due to severe underpayments of budgets has now come to the fore. Provinces like KwaZulu-Natal are at the greatest risk, with projections showing that as many as 11 000 teaching positions may be lost if urgent budgetary interventions are not made.

This funding crisis has largely been triggered by a centrally-agreed, and fiscally irresponsible, public wage increase in the October budget last year that is now forcing provinces to slash frontline service posts to the detriment of the most vulnerable.

The DA has long advocated for the protection of frontline services in the budget, and we urgently call on Treasury to intervene to avert these budget cuts by slashing wasteful expenditure in underperforming departments and focusing on economic growth and infrastructure development to create a more sustainable future.

We also call for an urgent reigning in of the state’s bloated wage bill by freezing the salaries of the public servants who are not covered by Occupation Specific Dispensation (OSD). This category includes managers, administrators and supervisors who are not of critical importance. In turn, this would enable the state to protect the wages of frontline workers by ensuring that the majority of public servants who are covered by OSD receive CPI inflation-linked increases.