Charting the pathway to economic growth

Mireille Wenger, Minister of Finance and Economic Opportunities, explains how the Western Cape Provincial Government intends to achieve maximum impact while prioritising jobs, safety and wellbeing.

You described your Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) as a “framework of hope”. Please expand. We face significant challenges as a nation, including sluggish economic growth, high levels of unemployment and poverty, significant debt-service costs, a rising cost-of-living and a debilitating energy crisis.

In the face of these challenges, there are promising opportunities that present a clear pathway from recovery to growth in the Western Cape. Guided by our “north star” priorities of jobs, safety and wellbeing, and underpinned by our budget principles of protecting our core mandates, focussing on programmes that maximise impact, doing more with less to deliver value for money projects, while acting to protect the long-term fiscal sustainability of the province, the MediumTerm Budget Policy Statement and Adjustment Budget set out a “framework for hope” by detailing the funding allocations that will deliver hope to the citizens of the Western Cape by setting us on a course towards a better, more prosperous future.

What are the key priorities for your department?

Biography

Mireille has a Master of Arts in International Relations from the University of Stellenbosch and a Master of Philosophy in Criminology, Law and Society from UCT. She has also completed the Programme in Political Science and Sociology at Sciences Po in France. She has served as the Chief Whip in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament, chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on Covid-19 and the Parliamentary Oversight Committee and also previously served as the Chairperson for the Community Safety Committee.

In all that we do, we are guided by our priorities of jobs, safety and wellbeing, which we believe are vital components for real change and our reason to hope. Which is why over the term of the 2022/23 Adjustment Budget, to keep us on course from recovery to growth, and to give full effect to our framework for hope, we will have allocated:

• R54.75-billion to our wellbeing priority

• R15.87-billion to our growth for jobs priority

• R2.65-billion to our safety priority.

Over the longer term, it remains critical that we unlock much higher levels of economic growth in the Western Cape, so that we can create opportunity.

We are currently formulating a new Growth for Jobs Strategy for the province.

At the core of this strategy is the understanding that the private sector drives economic growth and job creation and the government’s job is to enable this, firstly by providing the foundations for growth, such as infrastructure, energy and water, by unlocking housing opportunities and building reliable, safe roadways, as well as delivering skills for the economy. Secondly, government must create an enabling environment for entrepreneurs, businesspeople and citizens and make it easier for businesses, big and small, to trade in the Western Cape.

What is the provincial government doing about the risk posed by Eskom?

The Western Cape has made it a strategic priority to become energy resilient and to be the first province to beat loadshedding. Premier Alan Winde’s cabinet-level Energy Council brings together government, citizens, businesses and civil society to coordinate immediate action.

This coordination, with interventions over the short term, will be key, while we continue to lay the foundations, over the medium term, for an energy-resilient future through our Municipal Energy Resilience (MER) Initiative.

This programme is making important strides in unlocking energy opportunities by enabling municipalities, businesses and households to generate, procure and sell power. To enable the private sector, we are mapping out large private-sector energy users’ current energy useand-demand growth projections as well as their alternative-energy-supply interventions and plans. The intention is to map this information against municipal grid capacity to enable the fast-tracking of private-sector implementation of small-scale embedded generation and electricity-wheeling solutions where possible.

To support municipal readiness, the Western Cape Government has provided funding to 10 municipalities for 16 foundational energy studies including the development and updating of electricity master plans and cost-of-supply studies. We are in the process of having standardised legal agreements drafted for the use of municipal grids in wheeling transactions.

Our goal is to generate an additional 500MW of power for the Western Cape by 2025, and we are constantly looking at ways to focus, innovate and scale up so that we move towards our goal as fast as possible.

What was behind the somewhat improved statistics for unemployment in Q3?

It was welcome news that, according to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, just over 85 000 jobs were created in the Western Cape in Quarter 3, and that over 203 000 jobs were created in the Western Cape year-on-year. While the Western Cape’s expanded unemployment rate also decreased by 1.8 percentage points quarter-onquarter and by 0.8 percentage points year-onyear, the fact is that we need to achieve much higher and sustained economic growth if we want to employment to increase.

Has progress been made in terms of the functioning of the Port of Cape Town?

Ensuring that the Port of Cape Town (PCT) reaches its full potential is a priority for the Western Cape Government because we believe that logistics, mobility and export facilitation are critical pieces of the puzzle of break-out economic growth that gets us on new trajectory of prosperity and hope.

According to a high-growth scenario contained in a research report by Impact Economix, an efficient PCT with sufficient capacity and investment in key infrastructure has the potential to contribute an additional R6-billion in exports, roughly 20 000 direct and indirect jobs, over R1.6-billion in additional taxes by 2026, and an additional 0.7% contribution to the Western Cape Gross Domestic Product.

To achieve this high-growth scenario, the Western Cape Government is committed to working together with all levels of government and the private sector to unlock the port’s full potential. We believe that enabling private sector participation at the Port of Cape Town, as is currently the case for Durban and Ngqura, will be key to this. ■