SA politicians, especially those of the governing party, are increasingly behaving in a manner that fits British author Ernest Benn’s description of politics. Benn, who was also a politician, reportedly described politics as the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
The governing party does this, and much more. It has created multiple socioeconomic problems, and in some instances made existing problems worse than they were before it came into power. Then it often pretends these problems were created by someone else.
Take President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent statement about the failure of some provincial government departments to spend all their allocated funds. EWN quoted Ramaphosa as saying he wanted to appoint a budget director in the presidency to monitor expenditure by provincial governments.
The context to Ramaphosa’s statement was that the presidency had received a report from the Treasury showing that some provincial government departments had returned funds they failed to spend by the end of the fiscal year.
“And now I want to have someone in my office who will just be monitoring budget spending.” President Barack Obama of America had a budget director, Ramaphosa reportedly told an ANC gathering in Pietermaritzburg.
But Ramaphosa is diagnosing the expenditure problem incorrectly. The real problem is not the monitoring of provincial expenditure. It is that ANC politicians have weakened the provincial public service so they can loot the public purse.
Unused funds
Looting aside, successive ANC provincial administrations have been ignoring Treasury recommendations on public finance management. Interestingly, the DA-run Western Cape provincial government has been taking Treasury advice, which partly explains its better performance.
There’s no shortage of expenditure-monitoring institutions. Ramaphosa’s statement attests to this — he was made aware of unused funds by provincial departments by a report from the Treasury. Clearly, monitoring isn’t the issue.
The Treasury, not the presidency, is the institution that is mandated by the constitution (chapter 13) and the Public Finance Management Act (chapter 2) “to ensure both transparency and expenditure control in each sphere of government”.
This simply means that Ramaphosa’s budget director would have no powers to act against provincial government departments that fail to spend their budgets. That’s because only the Treasury is empowered by the constitution to “enforce compliance” with transparency and expenditure control measures. Unless the constitution and the Public Finance Management Act are amended to give the presidency the requisite powers.
The Treasury has undoubtedly been weakened over the past decade, which would have been made worse by the wear and tear that affects all institutions whether private or public. The Treasury, which is still run by an acting director-general drawn from its pool of retirees, has been screaming for attention since Ramaphosa took power from Jacob Zuma in 2018.
Take time
Ramaphosa’s statement suggests that he regards the Treasury as weak, but instead of taking steps to have it fixed he wants to create another office to replicate what the Treasury already does, and by his own testimony does well.
It has been the tendency of successive ANC administrations not to fix existing institutions but to create new ones. The problem with this approach is that new institutions take time to create and become running, often much longer than it would have taken to rebuild an existing one. As the department of monitoring & evaluation for years operated without a full legislative framework, in some instances it had to rely on the Treasury’s mandate to issue instructions to fellow departments.
Ramaphosa’s proposal is also based on a gross misunderstanding of the US presidential system. In the US, fiscal powers — putting together the budget and tabling it before Congress — vest in the president, not the treasury secretary (the equivalent of our finance minister).
To help the US president carry out his fiscal responsibilities he has an office of management & budget, whose remit is wider than budget development and execution. It includes, for example, co-ordinating and reviewing all significant federal regulations from executive agencies.
Clearly, Ramaphosa’s proposal is based on an incorrect diagnosis of the problem about provincial government expenditures and he has therefore proposed the wrong remedy. The real problem is ANC politics, and its resolution requires a political resolve — something Ramaphosa has shown, repeatedly since he took over Zuma, he lacks.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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