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There may have been an “anti-poor” backlash against the budget tabled in Parliament this week, but an answer to a Parliamentary question revealed that often money alone is not enough to address serious social ills.
Political will is just as crucial to put systems in place to achieve the very thing budgets are intended for. This in turn will require rigorous monitoring by citizens and civil society of budget spending and its impact – something that will hopefully improve with the new Vulekamali initiative for greater public input in budget processes.
The government has stressed the protection of women and children as a priority, yet the number of child murder cases reported is alarming. Democratic Alliance minister of Parliament, Manny de Freitas, asked the minister of justice in a written question recently how many child murder cases had been recorded by the department in every province over the past three financial years. The answer was startling – Justice Minister Michael Masutha acknowledged that the department “can unfortunately not respond in respect to data on child murder charges”.
Masutha said the department of justice and constitutional development’s integrated case management system did not currently provide for victims’ details yet, and the department was thus unable to specify if a criminal charge of murder was linked to a victim such as a child.
This lack of statistics not only hampered any effort to intervene in the spate of child murders that rocked the country the past years but also raised questions on how budgets that were allocated to issues like this had been spent, what informed it and – more importantly – if it was value for money.
The integrated case management system was part of the department’s overall justice modernisation programme. The budget for this programme has been growing at an average of 3.1% since 2014, meaning this cannot just be blamed on a lack of funds. An amount of R971.8 million was allocated for this in the coming financial year yet Masutha still referred to getting these statistics “in future”.
“Efforts are in place to address this gap. Thus far, a data collection tool for the details of all crime victims, including children, has been drafted, and is now being taken through the stakeholder-consultation process,” he said.
“But in the future the department will be able to report on it from the integrated justice system transversal system data.”
But child murders are a pressing issue now, and in need of immediate solutions.
By November last year, non-profit organisations recorded 66 child murders in the Western Cape and also put the spotlight on efforts of the police to curb these murders.
DA MP Dianne Kohler-Barnard bemoaned the “lack of urgency” shown by the government in tackling the scourge of child murders.
This after the minister of police revealed child murders had increased by 14.5% year-on-year, totalling 969 cases in the 2014/15 financial year. Tackling social ills is thus not just a money issue but also a question of political will, which becomes increasingly important given budget cuts and departments having to do more with less.
This article originally appeared on ParlyBeat, a biweekly digital newsletter aimed at linking policy and oversight processes in Parliament to the lived realities of ordinary people. Follow ParlyBeat on Twitter
