Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga. Picture: GCIS
Angie Motshekga. Picture: GCIS

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SA HAS consistently spent an average of 20% of its national budget on education.

According to the 2015 Intergovernmental Fiscal Review, in 2010 total basic education expenditure was roughly R104bn.

This year Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan announced an allocation of R204bn, projected to rise to R254bn by 2018.

On average, education has taken up 33% of provincial expenditure. About 80% of this goes to compensation, largely to pay teachers.

Compared to other countries, SA consistently makes education a priority in the budget.

However, focusing on the budget obscures questions about teaching quality, pupil throughput, infrastructure provisioning and access to special needs education.

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There is often a disjuncture between the objectives of Treasury’s allocation and what the national and provincial basic education departments can or attempt to implement.

Gordhan’s focus in his budget this year was on infrastructure backlogs and expanding early childhood development. One thing Treasury does well is identify priority areas that require special funding grants.

It also dreams big.

Although former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene optimistically stated last year that the education infrastructure grant of R29.6bn should "enable all schools to meet minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure by 2016", the backlogs persist.

So, in his 2016 speech, Gordhan has had to project their eradication by 2018.

Treasury has tried to incentivise rigorous planning to help ensure the allocated funds will actually be spent by provincial departments. This is a good measure.

However, Equal Education points out this approach has limitations as it is likely to benefit better capacitated, largely urban provinces.

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It argues that the way in which infrastructure grant funding is allocated to provinces "pits education departments against one another in a bidding war, as they are required to produce infrastructure plans, which then determine how much additional money they receive over and above the base funding."

The onus is on the national Department of Basic Education to work with poorer provinces to help them plan.

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has often pointed out that her department is the best expert and data collector on its own problems. It is the department’s job to ensure coherence and to mitigate competitive tendencies.

The trouble for the department, as we know, is the fraught politicised environments of provincial education departments, which find themselves captive to predatory interests seeking to enrich themselves through the administration’s supply chain. Treasury cannot deal with those kinds of problems.

There is a broader point we should consider about the necessity of independent and fiscally prudent treasuries in developmental states. Those that have to spend a large portion of their budgets on the poor must, of necessity, be exceptionally well managed and disciplined.

A distinction must to be made between government’s macroeconomic frameworks and budgetary priorities, and the mechanisms the Treasury uses to manage the public purse. The greater the need for developmental spending, the higher the threshold for fiscal accountability. Tracking every rand spent should be the Treasury’s forte.

• Mkhize lectures in history at Rhodes University