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Matshidiso Lencoasa
In his state of the nation address earlier this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised that government would invest in social infrastructure to build a “nation that works for all”. Yet, just two weeks later, the budget plan proposed real reductions in funding for school and health infrastructure.
For many South Africans, the true state of our nation is not measured in speeches or growth forecasts, but in the condition of the public services we rely on everyday. Classrooms and clinics are where the promise of our Constitution is meant to take shape.
As we mark Human Rights Month, communities across this country deserve a state capable of building and maintaining the infrastructure that makes the right to education and healthcare a reality.
An infrastructure budget that leaves schools and clinics behind
Despite a pro-infrastructure sentiment, this year’s budget proposes real cuts to building and repairing classrooms and clinics. Conditional grants for education infrastructure rise from R16 billion to just R16.2 billion, which, after accounting for 3.3% consumer price index inflation, amounts to a 4.3% cut.
Health infrastructure follows the same pattern, with the health facility revitilisation grant increasing by only 2%, which is a real reduction of 1.4%.
The cost of these choices is borne by ordinary South Africans who are forced to seek care in facilities that endanger their lives and those whose children learn in overcrowded, crumbling classrooms.
At the post-budget breakfast, we sought clarity on Treasury’s rationale. Both the finance minister and the director-general maintained that there was no real cut to social infrastructure, before arguing that resources shifted towards rail and road infrastructure, before arguing that resources shifted towards rail and road infrastructure would address spatial inequality and improve access to services.
Overcoming spatial inequality is essential in a country as unequal as ours, where distance remains a major barrier to accessing public services, particularly in marginalised rural communities.
However, this framing sets up a false choice. Roads and rail may help people overcome distance, but they cannot replace investment in the services themselves. Improved transport offers little relief if pupils arrive at dilapidated schools that remain overcrowded and unsafe, or if patients reach clinics and hospitals that are falling apart.
As the exchange grew more heated, Treasury’s leadership insisted that weak provincial implementation, rather than budget allocations, is the real obstacle to infrastructure delivery.
Civil society has long critiqued government’s poor planning, chronic underspending and weak accountability for exactly this reason: it undermines public service delivery in communities across our country. Acknowledging this failure cannot become an excuse for fiscal retreat.
When one part of our government struggles to deliver, the answer cannot be for other parts to retreat. An ordinary pupil is not responsible for a provincial department’s failure to plan properly or to spend public money meant a refurbish a classroom that has sat on a backlog list for years.
Yet, it is that very pupil who is forced to live with the consequences of that disinvestment, year after year, braving learning in an overcrowded, undignified space. Her need for a safe classroom does not disappear simply because her provincial department failed to plan or implement properly, and neither does national goverment’s obligation to her.
Worse, years of reliance on external contractors without building strong in-house skills have hollowed out the state’s capacity to plan projects and enforce accountability. This year’s budget reflects little targeted investment in strengthening the very provincial capacity weakness. Treasury cites it as justification for real-term reductions.
South Africans deserve better. A budget committed to building a nation that works for all would invest in the state’s capacity to spend every rand effectively to deliver quality public services. It would also invest in the accountability our people are so clearly yearning for.
Other infrastructure instruments miss the mark
The finance minister and director-general also argued that conditional grants are not the only way government invests in infrastructure. That is true. Instruments such as the Budget Facility for Infrastructure and the Infrastructure and Development Finance Bond are meant to support large, long-term projects.
But these tools are not built to fix the everyday infrastructure problems ordinary people experience in schools and clinics. Instead, they favour large, bankable projects, often in economic infrastructure, rather than the routine building, refurbishment and maintenance of people facilities where rights are realised.
Furthermore, while private financing instruments could perhaps play a role in infrastructure development, the constitutional obligations to realise socio-economic rights ultimately rest with the state. We, as ordinary South Africans, cannot enforce the right to basic education or access to healthcare against private investors in the same way we can the government.
For this reason, a budget from a state that is committed to delivering upon its constitutional mandate to its people would have invested in building its capacity to plan, deliver and sustain the public infrastructure that enables constitutional rights to basic education and healthcare to move from principle into a lived reality for all.
For now, learners and healthcare users across the country still rely on conditional grants to fix broken classrooms and unsafe clinics. When those grants are cut in real terms, the promise of alternative instruments offers little comfort to a child learning in a school on a backlog list, or to a patient seeking care in a clinic that has not been repaired. Until these new mechanisms demonstrably deliver classrooms and clinics at scale, conditional grants remain the most direct and reliable tool for realising the right to education and healthcare.
What Budget 2026 should have done
Instead of disinvesting, Budget 2026 should have strengthened the state’s ability to build by funding project readiness, genuine consequence management, and in-house technical capacity. Without these foundations, infrastructure budgets continue to fail our communities, leaving learners and healthcare users to bear the consequences of an incapable and unaccountable state.
Building a nation that works for all requires sustained investment in the everyday institutions that support people’s lives. It is not too late to course-correct by investing in provincial capacity to deliver quality infrastructure. This Human Rights Month should strengthen our resolve to build a state that places our communities at its centre.
Lencoasa is a budget analyst at SECTION27 and member of the Budget Justice Coalition.
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