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Finance Minister Tito Mboweni made much of the need to curb spending on personnel in the public service, especially at provincial level where 881 000 public servants are employed.
Their wages are set in negotiations that often result in pay increases far above the inflation rate.
Another 409 000 public officials are employed at national level, who earn budgeted wages.
The thriftiness does not necessarily extend to everyone as data from this week’s budget documents show.
Most of the employees in the national sphere of government get hikes above inflation in the next few years, despite the symbolic freeze on parliamentarians’ salaries this year.
Projections in the Estimates of National Expenditure show the total national-level staff shrinking by a tiny 0.8% – largely due to cuts in the security cluster.
Other departments will grow modestly. Not all departments or public servants are equal.
Some smaller departments consist almost entirely of a skilled group of senior officials with high earnings; others include thousands of badly paid junior officials.
In 2022 the higher education department will remain the worst paid department with an average salary of R416 000 a year .
This includes almost 9 000 university staff earning R300 000 or less and 174 top administrators earning more than R1.6 million.
The economic development department, the smallest one, will displace science and technology as the best-paid with the average annual salary rising to R981 000 by 2022.
The biggest increase in pay will be at the Independent Police Investigative Directorate.
The staff complement will not change at all in the next three years, but the average remuneration is set to increase 8.3% to an average of R613 000 a year.
Zuma vs Ramaphosa
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s salary is budgeted to increase from last year’s R3.6 million to R4.5 million by 2022.
This amounts to average increases of 7.2%.
On average, presidency staff will get a 6.1% salary increase in the next three years. Zuma was paid about R3 million in his last full year at the helm.
Ramaphosa’s presidency will be far more expensive than Zuma’s was. The presidency’s budget was R511 million last year and will jump to R700 million next year.
A lot of this is more salaries which the budget document ascribes to re-establishing an in-house research unit in the next three years.
A less flattering increase is in the budget for travel. This will double next year from R56 million to R109 million and then drop to R73 million the next year.
Under Zuma it tended to be about R55 million a year.
A noticeable difference between the Zuma and Ramaphosa presidencies is the spending on legal services. In Zuma’s last three years in office these totalled R40 million.
The Ramaphosa presidency spent R7 million in its first year and has budgeted for R23 million for the next three years.
On the other hand, Ramaphosa is budgeting more for consultants and contractors. Zuma spent about R3 million a year on “business and advisory services” consultants, but Ramaphosa will raise this to R9 million.
Ramaphosa also intends to spend R17.4 million on “contractors” this year compared with R5.7 million last year.
Do you think Tito’s budget will help in the long run?
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