Is the civil service wage balloon about to pop?
Earn more, do less…nice work if you can get it!
South Africa has the third-highest government wage bill of 20 major global economies when taken as a share of GDP. That’s according to studies by both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
That means we spend more on paying our civil servants than the UK, US, Australia and Japan, all of which have economies far greater than ours, and infrastructure and service delivery levels many levels higher.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that South Africa’s public servants are due to receive a 5.5% salary increase in the current financial year, costing the government (well, actually, the taxpayer) R23.3 billion over the next three years.
This is just the latest in a long history of salaries that have increased faster than headline inflation, putting huge strain on the government’s finances.
Yet it’s hard to define what we’re actually getting in return for giving up an increasingly large portion of our taxes. The growing wage bill has sadly not come with improved productivity, better service delivery, or faster economic growth.
It’s not exactly a new problem, but it has undoubtedly been getting worse in recent years. In1995, South Africa’s public service wage bill was a comparatively paltry R55 billion. It ballooned to R724 billion by 2023/24.
But here’s the kicker:
In 1995, South Africa had 1.27 million public servants.
Thirty years later, we have 1.28 million.
That’s an extra 100 000 people, but an additional R670 billion in salaries.
Somehow the maths doesn’t quite compute.
To me, the obvious question is: Why do salaries need to be so high?
The government says the wages (and regular increases) reflect the “growing burden on public servants over time.”
I don’t buy it.
In the past 30 years, the ratio of people served per public servant has increased from 32 in 1994 to 48 in 2024. That’s only 16 additional people per public servant. It hasn’t even doubled, yet salaries have trebled, quadrupled or more in the same period of time.
And then we read articles such as the recent one in BusinessTech, which showed that, in addition to footing a bloated wage bill, South Africans have shelled out an additional R200-odd million on ministerial and deputy ministerial travel in the last 12 months alone!
“This is a figure that will balloon as we await updated replies to our questions,” said ActionSA MP Alan Beesley, who vehemently condemned the “out of hand spending” by government officials while ordinary South Africans face economic hardship.
One of the most jaw-dropping examples he gave is that of Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie, who spent a shade under R5 million in international travel costs in one year.
McKenzie’s response when confronted with this expense? Flying business class was necessary to avoid illness on long flights.
And if that wasn’t enough to make you grab the nearest bucket, here’s another doozy:
Almost half a million Rand was spent on travel and accommodation for a receptionist who accompanied the Deputy Minister to both the Olympics and Paralympics.
Yet some of our best athletes miss tours, competitions and other opportunities because of a lack of funding!
I don’t even know what to say at this point, so I’ll let Alan Beesley say it for me:
“These are just some examples of reckless and out of touch spending. So many houses could have been built for the needy, lasting them for life, with what [government officials] pay for a couple of nights’ accommodation. It’s absurd.”
The situation becomes even more outrageous when you consider these stats from a report by the Centre for Risk Analysis:
95% of all personal income tax in South Africa is paid by less than a third of our taxpayers.
97% of all corporate income tax is paid by just 3.5% of companies.
Then we have the ever-rising costs of servicing government debt, and the continual pressure from public sector labour unions to keep increasing wages.
I think the state of affairs would be significantly less galling if the average South African could see value in the situation, and if they actually trusted, and felt confident about, our public services.
If, for example, you didn’t have to queue for literal days at Home Affairs to apply for an ID document or passport…
If our State-owned enterprises were running efficiently instead of being bailout black holes so riddled with mismanagement and corruption that they cannot adequately perform the functions for which they were created…
If senior public servants were appointed because of merit and their technical competence instead of family connections or loyalty to a political party…
And if there were no need for the thousands of disruptive service delivery protests that have become increasingly common in the past 5 years…
But, as the saying goes, if wishes were fishes, everyone would eat.
Instead, a 2023 survey by independent pan-African survey network Afrobarometer found that only 28% of respondents were satisfied with the provision of water and sanitation, just 12% were satisfied with access to reliable electricity and a mere11% with government’s efforts at reducing crime.
You don’t need me to tell you that this is an unsustainable situation which surely cannot continue for much longer.
Which brings me to the question I asked in the title of this article: Is our over-inflated civil service wage balloon about to pop?
The answer is a resounding “yes” unless something drastic is done – and done soon.
Political analyst Moeletsi Mbeki believes that moving money from the private sector, through taxes, to the public sector is not the answer as it means the private sector does then not have the resources to develop and reinvest in the South African economy.
He said to ignite economic growth, the government must cut public sector salaries to 6% to 7% of GDP, which translates to around a 50% cut in the civil service salary bill.
This will release vast sums of money that can then be invested in the economy – perhaps even taking us back to a situation such as the one we enjoyed in the early 2000s when our economy showed strong growth.
As Nicholas Woode-Smith writes in an article for Go Legal, “South Africa can get its spending under control. We just have to have the will to stand up against the bloat and make the right decisions to cut waste and corruption.”