Tag: government wage bill

For a country always in need of cheering up, recent news of better-than-expected economic growth was most welcome. StatsSA data showed that the economy grew by 4.6% after inflation in the first quarter on a seasonally adjusted and annualised basis.

Finance minister Tito Mboweni favours zero-based budgeting, an approach that would weigh each expenditure item, each departmental budget, against government goals. The Minister has said that this would entail focusing on ‘infrastructure development and other growth-enhancing measures’ and come at the expense of those programmes considered wasteful in relative terms.

South Africa was once speculated to have a government workforce larger than that of the United States. Think about that for a second or two. A country whose population numbers close to 57 million with more civil servants than a nation of over 300 million individuals.