(Debate in Parliament: 2021 Appropriations Bill)
Blaming the past has become a mantra for the ANC government and it keeps chanting it in an attempt to cast its own failures, corruption, economic decline, growing unemployment and consequent impoverishment of the country's people in a positive light.
Everything that has given rise to the decline is repeated year in and year out. Failed policy, mismanagement and everything else that has driven the country to the very edge of ruin.
What is most alarming, though, is that the ANC government welcomes a budget that embodies this decline. Budget cuts to the areas where the money is most needed are welcomed knowing full well that the little that is earmarked will be misappropriated.
It is a shame to welcome it. It is likewise a shame that the ruling party does not hold the executive authority accountable and that there are no signs of oversight.
Even if factors, like corruption and mismanagement, are overlooked, the many misguided priorities in the budget still stick out like a sore thumb.
The Minister of Finance repeatedly said that expenses will be cut back. And yet contractors are appointed for vast amounts of money while there are already officials in the public service, earning large salaries, who are supposed to do the work.
Why hire a company for R150 million to do media liaising and arrange a TV interview if there are already people employed by the state to do exactly that? It is wrong and unscrupulous, regardless of whether it costs R10 or millions of rand.
Cuban engineers, doctors and mechanics are brought into the country, at a cost of millions, to do the work while there are many experts in South Africa who can do it, many of them unemployed. This budget will simply perpetuate this problem.
All this is happening while the government is making budget cuts that will hurt the ordinary person the most, people like educators and nurses.
There are numerous qualified social workers who, amid the biggest social crisis that the country has seen in a long time, find themselves without a job or an income because the government has decided to cut its budget allocation to them so that it can squander the money on luxuries and the protection of supposedly important persons.
It is wrong and unacceptable. It is wrong to continue implementing destructive policy, like Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Affirmative Action (AA), that benefits a select few while it sows the seeds of racialism far and wide.
The time has come for the government to admit that it has failed and to take full responsibility for it. It is also time, after 27 years, to stop blaming the past and making it the scapegoat for people's greed and the government's incompetence.
