An emergency budget needs bold decisions, including a bigger public sector - The Mail & Guardian

We also need toand fast track South Africa’s transition to a low-carbon future. This entails so much more than just the production of utility-scale renewable energy and the local manufacturing of RE infrastructure. It must be a society-wide transition that includes the retrofitting of all buildings to be energy efficient and transforming sanitation systems to be more water efficient.

All this necessitates a far larger public sector and commensurate public-sector wage bill. Choosing this bold path would provide work for many. It will also be work that contributes to the improvement in people’s lives and the standard of living within their communities and to combating growing wage inequality. Perhaps most urgently it will begin the transition required to halt the climate crisis.The money for this exists.

This would allow us to finance the expansive public sector we need. There are also substantial resources currently invested in financial markets — a large portion of this is fromand private pension funds.

This is an outline of the type of emergency budget we need, one that puts the needs of people and nature before profit. There is every good reason for us to use this emergency budget to deal with both the immediate coronavirus crisis as well as the historical and structural inequalities that have long pre-dated lockdown. The time to act is now. Not to act would be a tragedy and yet another missed opportunity.

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