The South African Municipal Workers’ Union notes the Minister of Finance’s maiden Budget Speech as delivered on the 21st February 2018. This Budget has not met our expectation, we in fact do not believe that this is a pro-poor budget as we had hoped for.
We however welcome the budget’s prioritisation of social spending in the form of social grants, health and education. We welcome the additional funding to the Department of Health to focus on the National Health Insurance scheme. We also welcome the R57 billion funding for fee free higher education in the next three years. We believe that fee free higher education is the single latest salary increase for the working class.
We also welcome the R6 billion advanced to the Department of Water and Sanitation to assist with the drought relief. We believe that this will go a long way in ensuring that the water crisis currently faced in Western and Eastern Cape Provinces are addressed. We also believe that there is a need for a holistic approach to the water crisis in the country, an approach which will particularly focus on rural areas of the county which we believe are the hardest hit by the water crisis.
We also welcome the decision to assist municipalities in putting in place mechanisms of proper and adequate revenue collection mechanisms. We however believe that these mechanisms should not be a way of marginalizing the poor from benefiting from service delivery. SAMWU is convinced that municipalities do not exist for profit making but rather for their constitutional mandate which is the delivery of services.
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