March 2012: Quarterly Update

During the first quarter of the year, government traditionally spells out its various departments’ plans for the year. Tshwaranang has been engaging with a variety of these.

On 13 March Tshwaranang appeared before parliament’s Police Portfolio Committee to comment on the SAPS’ Budget Vote for 2012/13. A summary of our arguments is contained in this article for the Mail and Guardian: Police’s blue-sky budget found wanting

“The police divide their budget among five programmes: administration, visible policing, detective services, crime intelligence and protection and security services. The bulk goes to visible policing, followed by administration; detective services get the third-largest share.
Much more than that is hard to deduce from the budget vote — and herein lies the first challenge to assessing the individual budgets’ adequacy.”…. Read the full Mail and Guardian article

You can also read the minutes from the Police Portfolio Committee on the hearings (you will however, need a subscription to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group to access these) SAPS promotion allegations; Western Cape appointments; SAPS Strategic Plan 2012: input by POPCRU, SA Police Union, Civil Society Prison Reform Initiaitive, Institute for Security Studies, Tswaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, Auditor-General

For another take on the hearings, here’s Business Day’s article: Police unions doubt top brass

“With a former national police commissioner in prison for fraud and corruption, and his successor suspended, ordinary police officials had no confidence that serious consideration was given to these appointments, the South African Policing Union (Sapu) told Parliament yesterday.”…. Read the full Business Day article

On 22 February Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan presented his budget speech outlining government’s spending priorities for the year. This was Tshwaranang’s response:

“In his budget speech Minister Pravin Gordhan stated that the consolidated resources available to the state over the medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) period amounted to some R4.5 trillion. He spoke too of how business, civil society and organised labour have to be partners in building cohesive communities and promoting social solidarity. Both statements illustrate just how invisible the care economy is to government – the taken-for-granted, unpaid and underpaid work largely performed by women that goes into caring for children, sick and elderly relatives, people living with AIDS, the unhappy and abandoned and any others who don’t fit into our vision of a healthy, productive and trouble-free society.” …. Read the full response on NGO Pulse

And on 9 February, President Jacob Zuma gave his annual State of the Nation Address. The Women’s Legal Centre compiled this response with Tshwaranang contributing to the section on crime:

Government’s priorities affect all South Africans, the majority of whom are women and girls. Particularly black women and girls suffer multiple forms of discrimination and are among the most socioeconomically disadvantaged groups in South Africa.This review gauges how government’s priorities set for 2012 in President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address (SONA 2012) will affect the social, political and economic status of women, and measures the advances made with regards to the five priorities the president set in the 2009 SONA, namely:

1. Decent Work
2. Education
3. Crime
4. Health
5. Rural development & Agrarian reform

Download:  The State of the Nation, Government Priorities and Women in South Africa (pdf on this site)