Small and rural provinces in South Africa have clubbed together in a lobby to compel the national government to reassess budgetary allocations, North West Premier Lazarus Mokgosi said. The provinces are North West, Northern Cape, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, Free State and Mpumalanga.
This initiative, which is backed by the premiers of these provinces, seeks to ensure that the distribution formula promotes equity and aligns with the nation’s developmental objectives rather than perpetuating existing disparities.
Currently, these six provinces receive less budget than Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal who have bigger populations.
Mokgosi stated that the proposal was the subject of a recent extended cabinet meeting. “It’s a policy issue that would require a parliamentary process to ratify. Once it gains traction at the level of cabinet, it means the minister responsible for finance must be able to put forth a review process of the division of revenue.”
After that, he explained, the parliamentary process would begin at the technical and cluster level before moving on to the portfolio committee and national assembly for adoption.
“It’s a journey, we are not ambitious. Even if it can be implemented when we are not there, what is important is that we have started the process.”
He continued: “If in our rural areas, there are no job opportunities but you take lots of money to areas where there is economic activity, you are actually encouraging migration. Despite the pressure for services in the cities, people continue to migrate there. Every day, a new settlement is created. So, you are creating a problem for those provinces.”
Mokgosi argued that a heavy reliance on population data from Stats SA to determine allocation skewed the division of revenue formula. For example, during the recent midterm review, the population numbers for NorthWest did not tally. “We thought that in the NW (NorthWest) we were 4,2 million people but they said that we are 3,8 million. What it means for small and rural provinces is that we are going to continue to get lesser and lesser as our population declines.”
He said urbanised provinces like Gauteng, where people go to seek jobs, were sitting at 15-million people, which accounted for their “huge budget allocation”.
“The budget of Ekurhuleni and Joburg is more than NW. A municipality in Gauteng has a larger budget than a province, which shows the extent of the impact of the population statistics on allocations.”
Mokgosi said that while data from education and health statistics was taken into account, more variables needed to be considered. “Let the resource allocation be determined by the levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality,” he said.
He said when a province like Limpopo had serious infrastructure challenges, unemployment, and illiteracy, these variables ought to be considered for
allocations.
“If we continue this way, we will never address the challenges faced by poor and smaller provinces. We will always have Western Cape, Gauteng, and KwaZulu-Natal getting the lion’s share.”
