GOOD Speech by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament delivered during today’s Budget Adjustment debate
Speaker, after enduring the Minister’s thirty-five–page marathon of a speech, I walked out not inspired, not reassured, but deeply disappointed.
This year’s adjustment budget is nothing short of an insult to the people of this province.
On page 31, the Minister confidently declares that “no department’s budget has been cut.”
Well, that is simply false. Education has been cut. Local government has been cut. The provincial treasury has been cut.
So, let’s call this what it is: another blatantly misleading budget speech.
The rhetoric says one thing, but the numbers say something else.
The government’s big headline achievement, the so-called six “major investments” that came from the very performative Western Cape Investment Summit, were supposedly part of a R400-billion pipeline.
After all the fanfare, how much was actually secured? R50 billion.
And we’re told we should celebrate the 45,000 jobs coming from this, but only if we ignore the fine print.
That’s 45,000 jobs over two decades. Do the math: 2,250 jobs a year. That is not a grand economic achievement.
And while this government brags about attracting investment, it continues pouring money, recklessly, into a failing safety plan.
This administration has dug itself into a hole so deep that the only apparent strategy is to keep digging, shovelling more funds into a system that has shown little measurable return.
Then comes yet another vague promise: “We will reduce the number of people living below the poverty line.”
Which poverty line? Upper-bound? Lower-bound? Food poverty line?
They don’t say, because vagueness protects them from accountability and they make no provision for this in the budget itself.
And we’re told they’ll reduce the number of households with inadequate food access by 25% by 2030.
Where is the programme? Where is the budget? Where is the plan?
Addressing the hunger pandemic is urgent. It needs to be programmatic. But there is nothing.
Hunger is government’s constitutional responsibility – it is not the responsibility of charities and the community activist who feeds hundreds of kids out of the goodness of their heart – when they can.
We’ve seen this movie before, targets announced with great theatrics, only for this government to backpedal later, claiming targets are too difficult to set.
This adjustment budget is not a plan. It is not a vision.
It is a smokescreen of half-truths, inflated promises, and political marketing.
And the people of this province deserve better than this parade of misleading claims.
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Shongololo – millipede [sh-ong-o-loh-loh] A term used to describe a large brown millipede. It is derived from the isiZulu word ‘ukushonga’, meaning to roll up.