Your Excellency, our country, South Africa, is unique among parliamentary democracies throughout the world because every year in this House, we debate our Presidency's budget without having had the benefit of scrutinising it in the parliamentary oversight committee. While the budgets of all government departments are pored over and questioned before we come here to express our agreement or disagreement, the Presidency's budget is presented as a fait accompli, and we rise in this House with scant capacity, in other words, to debate what is being spent, where it is being spent and how it is being spent.
Every year, the IFP points to this deficiency and warns that it should not continue. We called for an oversight committee on the Presidency, but this has not yet materialised. We will not abandon our call, for we believe it remains necessary for the sake of transparency and to protect the integrity of the Presidency. As long as this is not done, there will always be wise stories, real and imagined, about what goes on in the Presidency.
Let me now speak in broad brushstrokes before focusing on the details. In this budget cycle, emphasis has been placed on the need to rebuild the fiscal space in the long term, so that there will be room in government's budget to provide resources for specific purposes, without jeopardising our country's economic stability.
As was pointed out in the guidelines to the 2012 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, a significant increase in borrowing, interest costs, debt and then servicing debt has eroded fiscal space. Thus, in future, less money will be available for purposes other than servicing the debt. The question now is: What will be neglected?
The IFP has pointed out that, despite the emphasis on rebuilding fiscal space, there is no discernible plan for doing this and, indeed, debt and borrowing seem to be the only strategy for the foreseeable future. How will we pay back this enormous and ever-growing debt, and when?
There is a sense of crisis, which is usually accompanied by the response: We'll fix things later. For now, let's just keep our heads above water. But that is neither responsible nor feasible, unless we accept the inevitable collapse of our country's economy.
We cannot escape the reality that our government spends more than it receives. That, on an ongoing basis, is a recipe for disaster.
Let us look, then, at the specific figures in the Presidency budget. It is difficult to come to terms with a figure of R67,3 million for travel and subsistence or R5,8 million for inventory, stationery and printing. One asks, are these justified figures? Again, an oversight committee, if it existed, could have investigated whether this is justified at budgetary level and whether cost and authorisation structures needed to be reviewed.
Other figures in the expenditure estimates jump out as patently unreasonable. The mandate of the Presidency is to support the President, the Deputy President and other political principals in the Presidency to execute their responsibilities. But how much support does the Presidency itself need to fulfil this mandate?
Apparently, the Presidency needs R18,1 million's worth of computer services, R58,3 million's worth of consultants and professional services to provide business and advisory services, and R25,2 million's worth of consultants and professional services relating to legal costs.
While these figures may pale into insignificance in comparison to larger figures mentioned, if we break them down into cost-per-person or a cost-per- day figure, how can such amounts be justified? If we say that these amounts do not matter, where will we begin to adjust personal attitudes within the Public Service in the spending of money that ultimately is not ours?
Furthermore, while consultants provide business and advisory services to the National Planning Commission, the National Planning Commission in turn advises and provides support to the Presidency. The National Development Plan is a key performance indicator, but whose performance? Is it the performance of the Presidency or the performance of consultants? What we seem to have is consultants, consultants and more consultants at every level.
The Presidency may quite reasonably, of course, need consultants that are "specialised in skills not core to the work of the personnel in this programme". The Presidency cannot allow these services to be obtained at a higher cost than is absolutely necessary. That would be an open door to corruption.
Tragically, the cost of corruption within our government overshadows the cost of anything else. This cost, far more so than the cost of a higher governmental interest bill, will be felt by our children and our children's children. We know that since 1994 some R21,4 billion a year has been lost by government due to corruption alone. According to the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution ...