702, Wednesday afternoon

Some suggestions that this is being used as a political leverage heading into the elections. Finally, this deal being done, which will see municipal workers being paid a substantial amount between 1.2 to 1.5 billion rand over this period of time. Let's get reaction to this now with Julia Fish, who's the executive director for Joeberg Can. Julia, good afternoon to you. Thanks very much for your time. We're at this deal.

Announced last night. What's your reaction to it? Dover Can support the fact that municipal workers deserve fair and decent wages for fair and decent work. However, the timing of this is very suspect, and it has been a policy of this current government to use the PFA in unnormal or abnormal ways to try and advance a political agenda. This agreement comes despite a warning from the

Finance Minister that I think this was in April that Joe Big was in the severe financial distress that the letter shouldn't suggested that this deal shouldn't be signed. Do you see this as a political agreement because of the local government elections? Or do you think this is a legitimate agreement that has been reached? The politically facilitated agreement is to make the lower end workers of the city on the same parity as the rest of the country.

It's been floating around for about 10 years. And what it will do is it will increase the wage bill from the current 22 billion rand, or 30% of Joe Berg's budget, to an additional 10 billion over the next three years. There's also some back pay, which has happened already. They already paid back in March, a figure of about 1.3 billion. There's the additional 1.5 that is kind of due as of June, and then additional.

Funding going forward, but at the top end, it will increase the overall wage bill. And when we're looking at the function of the city of Joburg, we haven't got fuel cards for JMPD cars. We are sitting with reservoirs which are months behind on being able to be fixed because they haven't got the liquidity to pay contractors. And in that state, if we are continuously upping the wage bill, we are continuously slashing the services that reservoirs.

Are going to get so. While we have to pay our workers a fair and decent wage, we've got to do something about the upper end entity costs where we're paying the managers there far above the presidents. And this is unsustainable. But the biggest problem here is that they pushed this through in the adjustment budget earlier this year, and they're again going outside of municipal finance structures to make this happen. But it's supported by

Province, and they're the ones who are supposed to put the municipality under administration. So, really, National Treasury can't do anything until province acts, and it looks like province are in favor. Julia, thank you. Julia Fish is the executive director at Joburg Can reacting to that last-ditch deal that was announced last night. I'm Wade van Niekerk, I've raised the world. Now it's your turn on a treadmill. This is Runix, the first 5K World Championship from Eclogy and World Athletics, available at Virgin Active for.