Acting CFO Lutendo Siphugu informed the committee that National Treasury applied a 0% budget adjustment allocation from the previous year to their budget for 2023-24.

"It has brought a lot of budget constraints," said Siphugu.

A further challenge is that the Department of Public Works stopped paying the rental for three of the commission's provincial offices – the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Northern Cape.

"This decision has a cost implication of R1.8 million that we had to factor into the 0% budget adjustment that we had received on the baseline budget from National Treasury," said Siphugu.

Then, there is also a 7.5% salary increase agreed upon by the bargaining council and the labour union.

Siphugu said it had a cost implication of R3.9 million which was not budgeted for. This now had to come out of the operational budget.

The commission's total budget is just below R224 million, of which 69% goes to personnel costs, leaving 30% for its operations and 1% for capital expenditure.

Furthermore, their budget is 101.4% of what they are going to receive from National Treasury.

The budget constraints meant that some projects and plans had to fall by the wayside. This included purchasing cars for use by staff in executing their duties, a conference, participating in the government's internship programme to give young people a foot in the employment market's door, and not extending the contracts of a staff member monitoring persons with disabilities' rights, and a PAIA information officer.

The commission's inability to retain staff was a concern for several committee members.  

The commission's chairperson, Bongani Majola, said they are also concerned about it.

In exit interviews, former staff members indicated they had received better offers elsewhere.

"We couldn't increase salaries for staff for a long time because of the limited resources we had," said Majola. "It is something that has worried us."

He said the commissioners had called on the commission's secretariat to report monthly on measures to retain staff and fill posts.

"It has had an impact on performance."

The long time it takes for the commission to complete its reports was another shared concern for the committee.  

DA MP Werner Horn said it undermined the commission's credibility. He mentioned the report on the riots of July 2021 in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

Source: News24