Economic justice

The newly-appointed Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan presented the 2010/11 National Budget to Parliament on 17 February 2010 in Cape Town.

As in the past few years, SANGONeT is pleased to present you with the comments and perspectives of various NGOs in response to the budget.

Issues covered by the NGO comments range from general observations about the budget to key development priorities such as education, social services, gender, urbanisation, children and health.

While it should be appreciated that the government has placed education as a priority within the budget, it is still our deep feeling that greater action is required. The Minister talks at length about the huge employment drive wherein companies will be reimbursed via the tax system if they employ inexperienced young people – he boldly estimates that 800 000 young people stand to benefit in this way. This is highly commendable.

I warmly applaud Minister Gordhan’s budget speech for providing an inspiring call to action by all citizens, and for skillfully spelling out a realistic trajectory of practical areas of action.

In our response to President Zuma`s State of the Nation Speech last week, SACTWU issued a press release which stated the following:

The Socio-economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI) is a new NGO set up to provide individuals, communities and social movements with legal, policy, research and advocacy assistance around housing, basic services, and migrant rights and livelihood issues. We have chosen to comment on some of the aspects of the 2010 Budget speech which are relevant to our thematic areas of work, and which we view as being critical to ensuring the maximum positive impact of government spending in economic and social policy implementation.

SADTU welcomes Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s budget speech presented in Parliament this afternoon. We welcome the fact that education continues to be our government’s number one priority. The R165 billion given to education attests to this.

We note the following on matters of education:

NEHAWU welcomes the Budget Speech that was tabled before parliament today by the Minister of Finance, Mr Pravin Gordhan and we are happy with the government’s commitment to increase and shift government spending on key priority areas with the intention to create a new growth path for the local economy.

Whilst there are important commitments in the budget speech which we support such as increased allocations for HIV/AIDS although we are concerned that the spending over the Medium Term Expenditure Framework period remains moderate.

The People’s Budget Campaign (PBC) is a civil society coalition comprising of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO). This coalition has for the past ten years tabled proposals on the spending of revenue by the National Treasury and argued for a participatory budget process.

The People’s Budget Campaign (PBC) is a civil society coalition comprising of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO). This coalition has for the past ten years tabled proposals on the spending of revenue by the National Treasury and argued for a participatory budget process.