By Brett Herron
If you were in charge of a constrained budget, in a country with severe literacy and crime crises, would you prioritise putting more money into education or policing?
On the one hand, many people believe that the key to a rosier future for South Africa lies in an improved education system able to deliver skilled and competitive matriculants to the job market – regardless of which school they attended.
On the other, there is no argument to be made against the necessity to improve citizens’ safety.
As with everything else in South Africa, how you determine your priorities may depend on where you live. Also, on whether you take the short-term or long-term view.
If you live in the suburbs, though you’re generally not exposed to the level of crime suffered in townships and informal areas, you’re still most likely to view safety as a greater priority than education because you’re able to send your kids to well-resourced schools.
In gang-infested ghettos, where many of the kids who manage to complete school, struggle to find jobs – because they are not equipped to compete for space in a struggling economy – you’ll get a mixed bag of answers.
There, parents’ desperation for safety competes with the desperation to provide better lives for children that will enable them to rise out of poverty and get out of the ghetto.
Of course, there are well-known links between the levels of education and crime. South African research published in 2015 in the International Journal of Educational Development, found that “criminal engagement decreases with educational attainment except for white respondents”.
According to the authors of a 2016 study on the link between education and crime in the US, published by the Public Library of Medicine, “Downward educational pathways were predictive of increases in crime, whereas upward pathways were associated with decreases in crime.”
I raise these questions, and some possible answers, as context to the Western Cape Government’s choice to pour money into policing, despite policing being a funded national government mandate, while falling short of money for education.
Apartheid meets austerity
To be clear, the Western Cape received more than enough money from the national fiscus to employ extra teachers this year, which the MEC for Education provided for in his approved budget just a few months ago.
But because the Western Cape has the discretion to spend the money more-or-less as it wishes, it has chosen to spend some of the some of the money assigned to the province by Treasury on the basis of the number of school learners, on policing.
As a consequence of this choice, more than 2400 teachers’ posts are to be scrapped.
According to the Western Cape, the reason for having to scrap the posts is an unforeseen increase in public sector salaries. But if salary increases affect all provinces, why is it only the Western Cape that wants to cut teachers’ posts?
It makes even less sense when, looking at the MEC’s budget, again, reveals that the salary increases were foreseen and the budget allowed for a greater increase than that at which wage negotiations were settled.
So what’s going on?
Sections 214 and 227 of the Constitution require that an equitable share of nationally raised revenue be allocated to provincial governments to enable them to provide basic services and perform their mandated functions.
According to the handbook: “The equitable share formula consists of six components that account for the relative demand of services and take into consideration changing demographics in each of the provinces. The structure of the two largest components, education and health, is based on the demand and the need for education and health services.
“The other four components enable provinces to perform their other functions, taking into consideration the population size of each province, the proportion of poor residents in each province, the level of economic activity and the costs associated with running a provincial administration.”
The Democratic Alliance-led Western Cape wants national government to drop the equitable share formula, and divide money to provinces purely on the basis of the size of their population.
The most developed province in the country is saying it needs the same level of support from the national fiscus as the least developed province.
What the DA is doing is trying to cement the funding advantages the Western Cape received under apartheid due to its specially engineered demographic, and retain provincial inequalities in perpetuity.
Holding teachers' jobs hostage
The question is not: Does the Western Cape want better policing? It clearly does. The question is: Is it clever to resource extra policing at provincial level at the expense of education?
As a member of the Government of National Unity, the DA is now part of the national government. If it wants government to drop the equitable share formula it should persuade its partners of the need to do so.
In the meantime, based on the current equitable share formula the 2024 National Budget indicates that the Western Cape will receive over R194 billion over the next three years.
The education share of the R194 billion amounts to about R93 billion, but the DA-led Western Cape government has only allocated R85 billion, of this funding, to education over the next three years.
While the MEC claims to have a R3.8 billion shortfall, over the next three years, in his budget – forcing him to cut teacher posts – the Western Cape government has in fact raided the education budget to the tune of R8 billion to spend on other things, like its policing plan.
It is unfair to hold teachers’ jobs hostage as a negotiating tactic.
* Brett Herron is a member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament and the Secretary-General of the GOOD party.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.